Los Angeles Bail Bonds …just another day

You state “NPR ran an important three part story last week on the half-million people sitting in jail — petty, nonviolent offenders who are there for only one reason — because they can’t make bail. It’s an expensive proposition; in Broward County, FL, for example, jail costs $115 a day per inmate. A far cheaper alternative, a pretrial program in Broward costs about $7 a day. That program saved county taxpayers $20 million a year. And NPR found court records documenting that the defendants still showed up for their court dates.”

The problem with this “math” is that it is incomplete. Did the defendant show up for every court appearance through sentencing? If not, they would have a warrant issued and need to be rearrested. This would be a considerable cost to the taxpayer. Most studies show that pre-trial release programs usually run at a true “failure to appear” rate of 10 to 15% of all cases. For each person that this happens with, it would wipe out the cost savings for 20 others. If you do the math, it actually costs more to release the criminals than to hold them until they are adjudicated or bailed out through private bail. Just because something seems to be cheaper at first glance, does not mean that it will be cheaper as an end result.

Did Toyota cut cost with their gas pedals? It may seem cheaper at the beginning, but do you think it is going to cost them in the long run?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.