The Portland Tribune recently covered the 10% deposit bail bond program in Oregon, and presented a good objective view of the programs failings. Currently, Oregon is owed over $81 Million by consumers who were released through the state’s 10% deposit bail program and who failed to show up for court.
Sound familiar? We covered an all too similar situation in Philadelphia, where their state’s bail debt is over $1 billion. To read more about that story, click on the following link, Philadelphia Series: Deposit Bail Has Failed Philadelphia.
Just funny money: Oregon is owed $81 million in bail; does anyone care?
Imagine a world of criminal justice where you could ignore a judge’s decree. Maybe you’ve been arrested, but you don’t show up for a court date.
Bad news there, right? Or maybe the judge, noting your failure to show up for trial, says you now owe the court $5,000 or $10,000 or even $50,000 (it’s called forfeited bail) and you’d better pay up.
Let’s say you don’t pay up. Year after year goes by, and you ignore the money you owe. Now you’re in trouble, right?
Not really — not in Oregon, where everyone knows that defaulted bail is rarely collected. Oregon is one of four states in the country that do not allow bail bondsmen. That means this state has developed an alternative system for making sure people get to trial.
Defendants who defaulted on their bail because they failed to show up for trials owe $81 million to the state of Oregon. Now, take that $81 million, and consider that in a harsher and more logical system, it could easily be closer to $1 billion. And it wouldn’t matter much — because no one goes after the money.
Here’s one of those little secrets that dedicated criminals know: Jail is expensive and, in most Oregon counties, in short supply. And, many say, jail is an unfair alternative for people awaiting trial. So criminal justice officials will do just about everything they can to make sure that all but the most dangerous defendants awaiting trial don’t stay in jail. Three out of four are released on their own recognizance without bail. When defendants don’t show up, that’s mostly OK too.
Oregon’s system of pretrial release is built on a series of winks and nods, a mélange of progressive ideas and out-of-date concepts cobbled together county by county. In some counties those systems may work on a practical level, but they are almost incomprehensible to all but those on the inside, and they are anything but transparent.
Bail bondsmen, who are lobbying hard in Salem to be allowed to practice in Oregon, operate on a simple, centuries-old premise: The best way to ensure a defendant shows up for trial is to provide a financial incentive. If the judge sets bail at $10,000, then $1,000 down will gain a defendant release pending trial. The defendant collects the $1,000 and gives it to the bail bondsman, who signs a note promising the court that the bonding company will be good for the other $9,000 in forfeited bail if the defendant doesn’t show up for trial.
If the defendant shows up, the $1,000 becomes the bail bondsman’s fee. He or she gets to keep it. If the defendant skips, the bondsman has a month or longer to produce him for trial before having to pay the court the forfeited bail. And that’s where bounty hunters, with their ability to virtually kidnap bail skippers and bring them back to court, come into play. The bondsman, on the hook for the forfeited bail, has the incentive to make sure his client shows on time, or soon thereafter.
Oregon banned bail bondsmen in 1974. But it maintained the 10 percent down, 90 percent default system that exists just about everywhere in the United States. In 2008, according to state data, criminal defendants forfeited $10.1 million when they didn’t show up for trials in Oregon. Do the math for the 90 percent forfeit and that should mean there’s about $100 million out there each year in forfeited bail. Play it out for 10 years and the forfeited bail owed Oregon would reach $1 billion.
Except it doesn’t.
Talk to people in the world of criminal justice — prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges — and they all claim to support the same concept: When dealing with criminal offenders, swiftness and certainty of consequence is more important than harshness. It isn’t the severity of a sentence or judgment that changes behavior, they say, so much as criminals knowing that if they do wrong, they will definitely feel the consequences every time, and quickly.
But when it comes to pretrial misconduct, everyone in the system knows that isn’t true. Except for those accused of violent crimes, missing a trial date doesn’t really matter much. The system still doesn’t want you taking up an expensive jail bed. Everybody acknowledges that your defaulted bail — that 90 percent you owe because you didn’t show up — is more a matter of smoke-and-mirrors accounting than real money.
To read the rest of the original article, click on the following link, The Portland Tribune.
Original Article:
The Portland Tribune
Just Funny Money, April 14, 2011