The issue of bail bonds reform has become red meat for Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s been on social media using issues in the system to criticize judges in Harris County, Texas’ most populous county. The Houston Chronicle reports that at a recent Houston City Council meeting, Mayor John Whitmire, a Democrat, complained that too many people facing murder charges have been released from jail. Some judges, he said, “just don’t take this seriously enough.” But as the Chronicle notes, neither side of the aisle seems willing to take on one of the key factors in the debate: the bail bond companies. Neena Satija, investigative reporter for the Houston Chronicle, spoke to Texas Standard about the fight for reform and how folks on both sides of the aisle see it.
Neena Satija: Well, bail bond companies play actually a pretty important role in the criminal justice system in a lot of states, including Texas, because they essentially make sure that people can get out of jail. They’re a jail population control measure, is one way of putting it. And the way that it normally works is you get charged with a crime in Texas, and depending on what that crime is, a judge – or a magistrate, an appointed judicial officer – will decide how much money you might need to pay in order to get out of jail. Now, you can pay that amount in full, you can pay that in cash, and then you’ll get most of it back, assuming you show up for all of your court dates, or you forfeit it. But most likely what a lot of people will do if they have a cash amount that they have to pay – because some won’t have to pay any cash at all – what they’ll have to do is they’ll have to pay a bail bondsman. And in Harris County, they tend to pay that person about 10% of what the total bail amount is. That bail bondsman will pocket that amount of money. And then if the person doesn’t show up for court, the bail bondsman has to pay the rest of the money to the court, but that’s a really rare occurrence. And so really what hasn’t been talked about here is when people are getting released from jail, charged with any crime, murder or whatever, some of them are getting released on million-dollar bonds, and a bail bondsman is the person that bonded them out.
So what we’re talking about here is, as critics would say, it’s an industry that basically profits on the status quo, on keeping these cash bail bonds, keeping the system intact, sort of resisting reform. Absolutely, yes. I definitely think that they have a key role to play, and they certainly profit from that role. Really, the main thing that the Legislature is talking about right now is making it easier for judges to actually grant no cash bail at all and say, “we’re going to hold you in jail, and it doesn’t matter how much you can pay, you’re staying in jail.” So that is not good in a way for the bail bond companies because they would lose clients. But there’s other legislation on the table that’s about eliminating cashless bonds. So that’s a situation where a judge or magistrate can say, “you don’t have to anything, and I will let you get out of jail.” You may have to pay something if you don’t show up for your court appearances, but in order to just get the release, you don’t have to any money up front. And so the bail bond industry is very supportive of those changes, which would almost certainly lead to more cash bonds and potentially more clients for them. And I think what a lot of criminal justice advocates and researchers say is that this is just not really going to solve the problem of people re-offending or committing crimes while released from jail on bond after being charged with another crime. They really feel like the whole system needs to change.
They also point out that there’s just not a lot of accountability for these bail bond companies. When a judge sets bail and the bail bond company bonds that person out, the judge doesn’t get to see anything, the court doesn’t see anything about what the bail bond company is doing in order to monitor that person. They say – and they’ve told lawmakers – that they do extensive monitoring, but they don’t have to publicly report any of that. They might file a report with the court if they’re worried that their client isn’t going to show up for court or if their client gets rearrested. But even in those cases, they probably won’t have to forfeit the rest of the money. That’s what the data shows. And so you’ve got this really interesting, very obscure private industry that’s monitoring a lot of these folks who are being released from jail, but we don’t have any way to see, nor do judges have any to see, what they’re actually doing and what kind of monitoring they’re doing. So it’s a very opaque system. And I think a lot of people would like to see some more accountability there.
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