I dialed a wrong number the other day.
To be more specific, I dialed the number that was given to me, but it didn’t go to the person I was seeking.
“Bail bonds,†came the answer on the other side of the phone.
I was trying to reach an attorney I didn’t know about a client I wanted to write about. I got the number from an attorney I do know. He must have had the number next to the one he gives clients when they are stuck in jail.
“I’m looking for an attorney,†I said. “Is this a law office?â€
“Bail bonds,†she said. “We deal with criminals.â€
The sentence stuck with me. Most people reading this column, I suspect, have never had to call a bail bondsman to get themselves or somebody else out of jail. Perhaps you’ve watched “Dog the Bounty Hunter†or some other television show that glorifies the profession.
People are also reading…
But the sentence — “we deal with criminals†— is mostly inaccurate. The primary customers of bail bondsmen are innocent people who have been charged with a crime and face the indignity of having to purchase their freedom while fighting their case.
Take Rebecca Carman. She’s a former Louisiana woman who came to St. Peters in 2019 after getting through rehab and looking for a fresh start. She faced a couple of misdemeanor charges from a night when things fell apart in her marriage. Carman was, according to the law, innocent until proven guilty.
She was not a criminal.
But that didn’t stop a bail bondsman named Wayne Lozier from driving from Louisiana to Missouri, barging into the home where she was staying, and physically taking her into “custody†to face a court date she had missed. Last week, Post-Dispatch reporter Katie Kull covered the trial in which a local jury found Lozier guilty of kidnapping.
His primary sin was not registering in Missouri as a bail bondsman and calling the local police before taking Carman and trying to drive her back to Louisiana. The jury saw something that most of us would see if we imagined ourselves in the situation: America’s love affair with cash bail has gone awry.
The United States is one of only two countries — the Philippines is the other — with for-profit companies involved in bonding people out of jail. It’s one of the reasons the U.S. . Across the country, every day, people charged with misdemeanors or non-violent felonies end up in jail because, unlike wealthy people charged with a crime, they can’t afford the bail to get home to their kids and jobs.
And if they can afford to pay 10% of their bond to a bail bondsman, they face the prospect of someone breaking their door down if they miss a court date, for whatever reason.
There is a better way. And in cities all over the country, documentation is piling up that it works. America should get out of the cash bail business.
Illinois this year became the first state . It means people like Carman will be sent home after an arrest, with restrictions to encourage them to be safe in their communities and show up in court.
While the “tough on crime†crowd — including the bail bond industry — spent more than a year clutching their pearls and decrying how judges were going to let “criminals†on the street, there’s already strong evidence that bail reform works.
New Jersey was the first state to pass bail reform in 2014. The brilliance of the law was that it required a yearly study for lawmakers showing how it was working. And the data is clear: . In New Jersey, crime hasn’t spiked, people are showing up in court and the state is saving millions of dollars — $68 million alone in 2018 — by cutting the jail population in half.
Similar studies, though not as comprehensive, have shown bail reform success in Houston and Los Angeles.
“I know I’m not the first person to be treated that way,†Carman told Kull after the conviction of her kidnapper. “I couldn’t be.â€
Indeed, she is not an outlier. She is a symptom of a broken system that values profit over justice, incarceration over freedom.
Last week, a ºüÀêÊÓƵ jury saw through the smoke and set an example for the rest of the nation.
People facing trial aren’t “criminals,†and cash bail is a uniquely American failure.
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