The bail bond fee in CA is 10%. If bail is set at $500,000, the fee will be $50,000! And if I understand correctly, you don’t get any back even if you appear as ordered. And you have to put something, usually property, up for collatteral.
Do I misunderstand? I might want to do a dasterdly deed someday, but I don’t want to rot in jail.
Peace,
mangeorge
Hey! an old (30) Italian dude won the Supercross thingy at the X-games! 
You understand right. But if you don’t want to waste $50,000, you can just pay the full half mil in cash. You’ll get it back when you show up for court, rather than giving a bondsman $50,000 in profit.
Therefore, I recommend you pursue a career in robbing banks.
This is why enlightened states have outlawed bail bonding and will accept posting 10% of your total bond amount with the court directly (you get it back)
There’s nothing “unenlightened” about private bail bonding, it’s just a different model for achieving the same goal. Plus it gives us cool TV shows like Dog the Bounty Hunter.
Of course it’s unenlightened, it foments the existence of scum like Dog
It’s also unenlightened in the sense that you can achieve the exact same result (ensuring appearance in court) without bankrupting a criminal suspect. It’s just plain better.
Overwhelmingly, I do agree with you that bail-bonding typically creates barbaric behavior and interests which shouldn’t be tolerated in an “enlightened” society, however, the bail-bonding industry (and it is an industry) would correctly point out that the two are not entirely equivalent. The 10% bonding ratio does create an incentive for the bondsman to actively ensure that the people he bails out are present for their court-dates thus creating the tack-on industry of bounty hunters, etc. In states with flourishing bail-bonding industries, like Florida, the industry argues that a certain portion of criminals are bound to try to skip their court appearances. The status quo ultimately places the costs of pursuing this portion on criminals that finance the “criminal recovery” system through their 10% fees as opposed through public means (hiring more police staff to chase down the folks that don’t show up for court).
There is absolutely nothing cool about this hick and his hillbilly brood.
I don’t understand how the bail versus bond system works.
The way I thought it worked, you posted 100% of your bail with the court or 10% of your bail with a bail bondsman. If you posted bail you’d get it all back; if you used a bondsman, you’d lose that money, which he kept.
Is that accurate?
If so, how does court bonding of the sort we’re discussing differ from bail being cut by 90%?
But the court would have the bond fee (instead of the bondsman) to hire the skip chaser. And the runner would forfeit that fee, enriching the courts.
Theoretically, if you pay the 10% to the court and skip out on your court date, the court can assess the full amount of bail (100%) against you. I say theoretically because it’s generally not worth bothering to try and collect that from your typical criminal defendant, but if you had the assets to pay the full amount and you skip bail (say by fleeing the jurisdiction), the court may decide that it’s worthwhile to seize the full bail amount.
Bail is either the actual amount of the bail or paid in the form of a surety bond. The court does not care where you get the amount from, it merely wants the amount of your bail posted as collateral for your promise to show up for court.
Say your (edit: bail) is 50,000. You can either surrender property to the court worth $50,000 or you can present the court with a surety bond (i.e. an instrument from a surety (a third party) who promises to pay the value of the bond if the terms of the bond are broken (i.e. you don’t show up to court)
The 10% is merely what the surety bond holder will take as a fee to issue you the bond.
Recognizing this, some courts will take the 10% instead. But this is still different from "having your bail reduced by 9/10 - the court can institute proceedings to seize your assets to cover the remaining unpaid portion of your bond.
the mechanism for ensuring you return to court with a “bail bondsman” regime is this: if you don’t show, the bail bondsman has to pay the court the entire value of the bond he posted with the court for you. thus, he has incentive to track you down and return you to court (then he gets his money back)
the mechanism for ensuring you return to court without a bail bondsman is this: you lose your money and an arrest warrant is issued
I worked for a temp agency that assigned me to work at a bond enforcment office, doing computer and clerical work, and these places have reputations that are built from the movies but in reality they are just businesses.
The bond agency knows who is likely to skip and who isn’t likely to skip and they are not just handing over money like in the movies. We had a lot of requests for bonds that the owner just laughed at. He wasn’t going to take those.
Also remember these bond agencies are insured. If you skip out on a $100,000 bond the bond agency isn’t out that money, he has insurance to pay it off. Of course then his rates go up and if he isn’t too careful he’ll lose the insurance.
Now when states act as bond agents, by allowing you to post the 10% it often is very easy for the state to collect. They simply suspend your driver’s license, and issue an no re-issue for your state ID. The social security admins will immediately turn over all your records of where you work, (They don’t do this for private collection agencies).
The funniest part I found of working there is how quickly people rat each other out. You should hear how the mother complains of the injustice and racism of the law and how her boy is innocent, and why is she forced to put up her house she worked 30 years to pay off, up for collateral.
Then the son would skip the court date, and I’d call and say "Gee Mrs Smith, your son missed his court date, you can tell us where to find him or tomorrow I’ll file the papers to take your house away. I figure you’ll be out of there by the end of the week (this is a lie of course). You know how fast the mother ALWAYS ratted out her kid.
“You’re gonna take my house!!! He’s over at his friends Milton’s house, pick his ass up throw him in jail and get my house off that agreement.” 
Can’t the bondsman also go after you for the cost of bringing you back, on top of the 10%?
Back in the day Hell’s Angels often “worked” as skip chasers. They also hired on for collection agencies, with amazing recovery success.
Yes, but that depends on what you contractually agreed to with the bondsman.
Here is Illinois’ bail statute. It has advantages over a bail bondsmen scheme that I think make it superior:
-Defendant pays 10% of bail to the court clerk, and the bail fee is 10% of the amount deposited (or 1% of the entire bail amount).
-Any costs, fines, or restitution levied against the defendant are paid out of the amount deposited before being returned. This applies to child support enforcement actions as well.
But just to clarify, the court can and regularly will seize the full amount of the bail amount from the bondman. This is part of what creates the perverse set of incentives that has allowed the bail-bonding industry to survive so long even with all of the arguments against it.
Let’s create a highly simplified example where 10% of all criminals will skip out on their court dates and the court or bondsmen will always fail to recapture these criminals. Also, let’s make the assumption that the court really doesn’t want the PITA of housing and feeding suspects they don’t have to; instead they’ll always set beil at an amount such that the criminal is able to pay it. Let’s say that every suspect has $100 in liquid assets readily available.
Let’s look at scenario A where bail-bonding is permitted:
The judge will set bond at $1,000. The $1,000 will be met with $900 from the bondsman and $100 from the suspect. In 10% of cases, the criminal will not show up for trial and the court will net, on average, $100 per bail arrangement made.
Now let’s outlaw bail-bonding:
The judge will set bond at $100, or alternately setting it at $1,000 and accepting $100 with the understanding that the accused will effectively have no assets to pursue if they no-show, etc. The court will now net, on average, $10 per bail arrangement made when criminals no-show.
The bonding arrangement has leveraged the amount of money the court can get when someone doesn’t show up by effectively extracting an insurance premium from every suspect arrested. This is part of why it’s so difficult to outlaw bail bonding; the local government is getting a cut of the action from a group of people that might be least able to afford it.
Just in case there was a mixup, I was talking about a court bonding system, not a bail bondsmen system in that post.
Sorry. Anyway, obviously you fully understand the bail bonding practice and I don’t think we disagree on anything, I was just trying to point out some of the factors of the current somewhat “standard” bail-bonding business that can make it so hard to extricate from the criminal justice system for the OP or anyone else that might be reading.
If its so difficult to set up a criminal law system without bounty hunters, why is that the U.S. and the Philippines are the only countries in the world that use them?
[wiki article on bounty hunters](wiki article on bounty hunters)
It’s broken, dude. 
Anyway, in the U.S. that kind of thing, the Old West Syndrome, is ingrained in our collective psyche.
And the Philipine culture once held the U.S. in high regard. I don’t know about now.
RIP, President Aquino.