The Bail Post
What do we know about criminal justice reforms or bail reform? How do we evaluate whether reforms are helping or making the situation worse? How can we take politics out of criminal justice and focus on public safety? The Bail Post seeks to be a place where legislators and the public can educate themselves on a host of criminal justice/bail reform issues. With various attempts at criminal justice reform from New York to Texas to California, many people are confused as to what is working and what is not. With the passage of time, more and more data is coming to light over what successful reform looks like and what reforms have been found to not be working. The rise in violent crime across the country has been startling and law makers and the public alike are desperate to find legislation that is effective. Some might ask whether some of the reforms making the situation worse? The Bail Post is an on-going discussion that seeks to cut to the core to provide education on the various issues raised and to highlight what successful criminal justice reform looks like and what measures have been disastrous. Join us and educate yourself about the best practices that jurisdictions must implement to keep their communities safe, while ensuring fairness to defendants. As a someone said recently "Public safety is the foundation of a society. Without public safety we do not have a society."
If you would like to listen other episodes of The Bail Post you can find a subject matter index of the different episodes at- https://pbtx.blogspot.com/p/subject-index-to-bail-post-podcasts.html.
The host is Ken W. Good; an attorney in Tyler, Texas who has been licensed for over 30 years. He has argued cases before the Supreme Court of Texas and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Mr. Good has written a book on bail called "Goods On Bail." He has also has had numerous papers published on Criminal Justice Reform issues. Mr. Good is a board member of PBT and serves on the legislative committee. Mr. Good is married and has two daughters.
The Bail Post
Episode No. 8- Are People Languishing in Jail Because of Surety Bail?
While bail as a pretrial release mechanism has been around since our nation’s beginning and is protected in the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, its continued use in the present day has been questioned by critics of the historically-based pretrial release mechanism.
In a recent study, David Krahl, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at The University of Tampa, found that in terms of sheer cost alone, the use of surety bonding costs Florida taxpayers absolutely nothing in terms of taxpayer dollars, while the use of other forms of unsecured pretrial release has cost more than $95 million dollars over a three-year period.
Krahl’s research, using a random sample of over 9,300 detainees from jails across Florida during a one-year period, showed that 56 percent of defendants who had been arrested spent between one and three days in jail, while two-thirds of the sample spent between one and seven days in jail before they were released. The data also showed that defendants in unsecured pretrial release status spent statistically significant longer time in pretrial detention than did defendants released on a surety bond.
“The notion that large numbers of defendants are languishing away in jail simply because they cannot afford the cost of a surety bond to secure their pretrial release is sheer fiction,” Krahl said. The average stay in jail prior to pretrial release was two days for the overall sample. The most predictive factor in determining number of days of pretrial detention was the number of charges filed against a defendant. No other factor was a predictive factor.