EVIDENCE REASSURING THAT BAIL BONDS REALLY DO WORK

Saturday, August 14, 2004

When it comes to tracking down bail jumpers, it's bail bondsmen and the bounty hunters they hire who really are "the long arm of the law."

Economists Eric Helland of Claremont-McKenna College and Alexander Tabarrok of George Mason University researched how often defendants who have been released from custody fail to show up for trial, and if they do fail to appear, how long they are able to stay at large. Their paper, "The Fugitive: Evidence on Public Versus Private Law Enforcement from Bail Jumping," which appeared in the April issue of the Journal of Law and Economics, is not online, but a working paper at http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/ PublicvsPrivate.pdf is available.

Defendants released on a surety bond -- that is, those who have paid a fee to a bail bondsman who puts up the bond amount -- are 28 percent less likely to fail to appear for trial than otherwise similar defendants who are released on their own recognizance. And if they do fail to appear, they are 53 percent less likely to stay free for an extended period.

Cash bonds, where the defendant puts up the entire amount, resemble surety bonds with respect to failure to appear, while defendants who post deposit bonds, paying a percentage of the bond amount to the court rather than to a bail-bond company, resemble those who pay nothing.

But if a defendant does try to make a run for it, his chances of lasting for a year on the lam are 64 percent lower if he's on a surety bond than if he just walks away from his own money.

Police, who embody the state's monopoly on the legal use of force, operate under more constraints than bail bond dealers and the bounty hunters they hire to trace skips. We wouldn't want it otherwise. But before agreeing to post bond for a defendant, the dealer also collects a lot of information that will be helpful in finding him -- residence, employers, spouse, children and schools, parents, cars, memberships and hobbies.

Then there's the mom factor. Bond dealers often require family co-signers to guarantee the bond amount if the defendant skips. "If hardened criminals do not fear the law, they may yet fear their mother's wrath should the bond dealer take possession of their mother's home because they fail to show up for trial," the authors say. And dealers may also remind the defendant's mother of the son's court date if she's a co-signer.

They're on the hook, after all, for the full amount of the bond if the defendant does not appear. And as economists understand, economic incentives matter.

Failure to appear is a substantial problem for the states. Roughly a quarter of released felony defendants, around 200,000 of them, do not show up for trial, and some 60,000 of them are still fugitives at least a year later. That's costly in terms of wasted time for courts, judges and lawyers and for police time tracking them down. It also means more crime. About 16 percent of released defendants are arrested again before the trial date for their original crime, and the authors note that the percentage of felony defendants who commit more crimes is undoubtedly higher than the percentage who are arrested as a result. Also, since the likelihood of punishment is a factor in crime rates, defendants who get clean away indirectly but effectively encourage more crime by others.

Finding skips is a high priority for bond dealers, but it's a low priority for police, who often have more urgent matters to attend to. The California Department of Corrections estimated in 1998 that there were more than 2.5 million arrest warrants that had never been served, and that 2,600 of them were issued in homicide cases.

Tabarrok and Helland point out that historically the surety bond system was seen as a progressive reform of the criminal justice system, because most defendants were held until trial. Bail bonds allowed innocent people (and even guilty ones who hadn't been convicted of anything yet) to be free in the meantime.

Now, the authors say, "when many people believe that 'innocent until proven guilty' establishes that release before trial is the ideal, support for the surety bail system is more complex" and it has been harshly criticized. To a considerable extent, the criticism rests on the belief that surety-bond defendants are less likely to appear for trial.

It's very useful to have evidence that this belief is mistaken.