By Sean R. Thomas
Special to The Sun
Published: Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 6:01 a.m.
For the past 15 years I have worked in Alachua County as a bail agent, and I have posted thousands of bail bonds for defendants. Using Court Services’ own formula, that translates to tens of millions of dollars in savings of incarceration costs for the taxpayer.
I have never received any taxpayer money from Alachua County. However, I have paid county bond forfeitures, totaling $29,000, for four defendants I could never locate.
That’s right, four of my bond clients in 15 years could not be found! I would challenge any pretrial release program to match that record.
The bottom line is this: bail bonding works. The reason is accountability — we get people to show up (or we pay big money), and unlike pretrial release programs, we will locate, arrest and return bond skips to jail, and we do this far better than any tax-based program around.
The courts, sheriff, state attorney and county commissioners can make all the arguments in the world for these public option programs, but the bottom line is, we taxpayers pay dearly for them!
It amazes me that as county and state budgets are strained to the point of busting, we sit here fighting over legislation that pits government’s expenditures in the millions vs. private tax-free alternative-bail, which has worked very well in this country since its inception.
Pretrial programs are being advertised as a cheap solution to expensive incarceration, and the claim that only low-risk offenders are put in them is simply not the truth.
Pretrial release takes taxpayer money and uses it to fund the release of criminals back on the streets with absolutely no guarantee that they will ever come back to court.
These pretrial programs are funded by the same general fund that directly competes for money that could be used for police, fire, teachers, etc.
Pretrial programs have become a way for the court to rationalize releasing huge numbers of people from custody.
Pretrial has this nice PR platform saying that they can supervise individuals for a quarter the cost, but in truth, we taxpayer are spending millions for them to “supervise” just a few thousand people, and of those, a huge percentage will fail to return for court, or will violate some pretrial program regulation and be returned to jail.
Alachua county has thousands of warrants on people wanted for not coming to court (14,000 active warrants at last count, and climbing every day). The vast majority of theses individuals were released on their own recognizance by judges, or were recoged into one of these “supervised” programs.
It was no surprise to me that the only county in this part of Florida to see an increase in crime was Alachua County. What is surprising is that neither the sheriff nor the state attorney, nor do many of our county’s judges, seem to have any problem with our judicial system’s “catch and release” philosophy.
Sean R. Thomas lives in Gainesville.
