HOME / DONATE / ONE LEVEL UP / ABOUT NCPA / CONTACT
Using The Private Sector To Deter Crime
Bounty Hunting: Making the Bail System Work
In accord with our precious civil liberties, the American criminal justice system allows most people who are arrested and charged with a crime to be released on bail pending trial. The private bail bondsman who guarantees the appearance of the defendant in court makes the bail system work with the aid of his enforcement agent, the bounty hunter."Currently, there are about 7,000 bounty hunters in the United States."
Because of the portrayal of bounty hunters in Western movies and on television, they are perhaps the best known of private law enforcement agents. Hollywood usually does not treat bounty hunters sympathetically. For example, Marshal Matt Dillon of the TV series "Gunsmoke" did not consider a bounty hunter to be on the right side of the law. However, the "Bounty Hunter" series starring Steve McQueen portrayed bounty hunting as an honorable business and was closer to historical fact. Real live bounty hunters were marshals, sheriffs and detectives. They included Pat Garrett, Bat Masterson, the Texas Rangers and the Arizona Rangers. Most people think of bounty hunters as a relic of the Old West, but they flourish today, primarily as private bail enforcement agents. These bail enforcement agents have an astonishing record of effectiveness. Currently there are about 7,000 bounty hunters, mostly part-time workers, in the United States. Some are women. These are people who find defendants who "jump" private bail.
The Commercial Bail Bonding System.
Bail operates on the principle that the criminally accused will be freed from jail once he guarantees his presence in court on a certain date by posting a significant sum of money. If he shows up, he gets his money back; if he doesn’t, he suffers a major financial loss. Since most criminal defendants do not have enough money to post the full amount, the market provides the professional bail bondsman. If the bail agent is willing, he posts the entire bond in exchange for a fee, customarily 10 percent of the total bond. The bail agent loses all of the bond and usually his 10 percent commission if the defendant fails to show up in court.The private bail agent can only stay in business if at least 95 percent of his clients show up in court. Uncounted numbers of agents have gone broke for failure to run their bonding business as a business. That is why surviving private bail agents are so efficient at ensuring the appearance of their clients - at no cost to the taxpayers. Frank Callahan, a bail agent in New Jersey, says, "I lose 100 percent of my profit if the guy jumps bail. That’s a real incentive for me to monitor my people."42 Bail bondsmen expend a great deal of energy and ingenuity in getting their defendants to court. Usually bondsmen require a cosigner for the defendant’s bond, typically a family member. Callahan says, "I try to get Mom and Dad on the hook." With family members’ property at risk, the odds improve that the defendant will come to court. If he is a no-show, his family as well as the bondsman lose a lot of money. This arrangement resembles the "bonding" of ancient Anglo-Saxon tradition.
How Bounty Hunters Make Private Bail Work.
A significant reason that private bail works is the use of bounty hunters, or "bail enforcement agents," to recover fugitives. Most work part-time because their primary business is bail bondsman or private investigator. Every state requires that they be licensed and regulated. In a majority of cases, bounty hunters directly apprehend the fugitives. In the remaining cases, they locate and identify the fugitive and let the police make the arrest. They are driven by a powerful incentive: they receive no compensation unless the fugitive is returned to the court. Bounty hunters generally earn between $20,000 and $30,000 a year (at $1,000 to $2,000 per fugitive recovered) for their part-time efforts."The fugitive rate for defendants out on private bail is under 1 percent."
Once a defendant skips, the bondsman authorizes the hunt by sending out notices to relevant bondsmen and bounty hunters in their national network. The program bears a resemblance to Crime Stoppers. Any person can engage in the search, but most of the time professionals make the recovery. The national network of agents provides great flexibility and is less hindered by restrictions and local jealousies than are police. According to Gerald Monks, a Houston bail agent and former executive director of the Professional Bail Agents of the United States (PBUS), "They are the only ones in the criminal justice system to have an economic reason to ensure the defendant’s appearance in court.&quo43
On the whole, the private bail bonding system seems to work well.
- According to one source, the fugitive rate for defendants out on private bail (defined as the percentage of defendants not apprehended three years after failure to appear in court) is under 1 percent.
- An Alexander Grant study claims that private bail agents have a 0.8 percent fugitive rate versus 8.0 percent for public bail.45 [See the discussion of public bail below.]
- A U.S. Department of Justice study of the 75 largest counties in 1990 found that only 14 percent of felony defendants released on surety bonds initially failed to appear in court versus 27 percent of those released through other methods.
And at the end of one year the fugitive rates were 3 percent and 9.5 percent respectively.
The Legal Status of Bail Enforcement.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1873 expressed its support for commercial bail bonding and affirmed wide latitude for bondsmen in recovering a fugitive from justice:When bail is given, the principal is regarded as delivered to the custody of his sureties. Their dominion is a continuance of the original imprisonment. Whenever [bondsmen] choose to do so, they may seize [the fugitive] and deliver him up in their discharge, and if that cannot be done at once, they may imprison him until it can be done.... They may pursue him into another state; may arrest him on the Sabbath; and if necessary, may break and enter into his house for that purpose. The seizure is not made by virtue of new [legal] process. None is needed.47 A state court could ignore this U.S. Supreme Court decision if it conflicted with a state statute, but most courts uphold sureties’ right to apprehend fugitives. As one court said:
The bondsmen are as the four walls for the jail, and in order to fully discharge their obligations they are obliged to secure their principal’s [defendant’s] presence and put him as much in the power of the court as if he were in the custody of the proper officer.48
The private bail bonding system has been so successful that this report proposes private bonding to privatize the probation and parole systems and to aid in restitution to victims of crime. These proposals are analyzed below.
"The fugitive rate for public bail is about ten times that of private bail."