Bounty Hunters The Really Long Arm of the Law Eric Helland Alexander

Bounty Hunters The Really Long Arm of the Law Eric Helland Alexander Tabarrok Department of Economics Department of Economics Claremont-McKenna College George Mason University

The History of the Surety System and Commercial Bail In medieval England accused criminals were jailed until judged. In most of the country there were only roving judges who might not show up for months. The surety system developed as an alternative. The surety system was adopted by the United States with the exception that personal surety was slowly Medieval English Prison Robin Yap.

The Twentieth Century Initially, the surety system and commercial bail were seen as a progressive measure because they helped people to get out of the default option of jail. In the twentieth century, however, the default option was more often thought of as release and thus money bail was reconceived as a regressive measure that kept people in jail. Commercial bail thus came under widespread attack and criticism and it was even

The Attack on the Commercial Bail System “Bail bondsmen are a cancer on the body of criminal justice.” Judge William Snouffer “The commercial bail system is ‘offensive’ and ‘odorous.’” Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun The American Bar Association says "The central evil of the compensated surety system is that it generally delegates public tasks to largely unregulated private individuals.” American Bar Association, emphasis added. “The present system of commercial surety bail should be simply and totally abolished .It is not so much that bondsmen are evil – although they sometimes are – but rather that they serve no useful purpose.” U.C. Davis law Professor, Floyd Feeney But is it true, does commercial bail serve no useful purpose?

Introduction Most felony defendants are released before trial. One quarter of all released felony defendants, some 200,000 a year, fail to appear at trial. About 60,000 felony defendants a year skip town and disappear for a year or more.

Types of Pretrial Release Own recognizance Surety bond Cash Bond Public bail (called deposit bond) We consider each form of release to be a “treatment” and evaluate the effect of each treatment on the failure to appear rate, the time to recapture and the fugitive rate.

Commercial Bail and Incentives A defendant facing a 5,000 bond would typically pay 500 (10%) to the bail bondsperson. In return, the bondsperson would post a 5,000 bond with the court. If the defendant appears he does not get the 500 back. Since the fee is sunk, it's often said that the commercial bail system discourages appearance. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas argued that the commercial bail system fails "to provide an incentive to the defendant to comply with the terms of the bond." Drimmer (1996, 742), says "hiring a commercial

Commercial Bail: Incentives to Appear The arguments misses the role of other incentives. Lenders generally create incentives to encourage repayment: Collateral on loans Lenders create a “circle of responsibility” people who have the same incentive as the bondsman to get the defendant to court. E.g. cosigning by family members. Bond dealers will also monitor their charges and require them to check in periodically. Thus it is an open question how these

Commercial Bail: Incentives for Recapture The “treatments” differ especially in how they respond to those who abscond. Under own recognizance, deposit bond or cash release the defendant who skips town is pursued by the police. But if you are released on commercial bail and you skip town you are pursued by

Bounty Hunters If you are released on commercial bail you are pursued by the surety and his or her agents, “bounty hunters.” If the defendant is not returned within a short period of time (typically 90-180 days), then the bail bondsman forfeits the bond. Bail bonding is competitive-95% of clients must show up to turn a profit. Bail bondsman has strong incentives to track down skips. In some ways bounty hunters have greater powers than the police because legally the bail bond agent stands in for the jailer and thus inherits the rights of the jailer.

The Critics “Regarding the assertion that bondsmen and their agents actually bring in absconders, a committee of the Illinois legislature consider this claim 30 years ago and concluded that “with the nationwide exchange of information between law enforcement agencies and the F.B.I. the average bail jumper has little chance of escape.” Given the current nation-wide systems for exchange of information between law enforcement agencies that chance has diminished even further.” S. Kennedy and D.A. Henry 1996

The Reality Many accused criminals fail to appear. Police bureaus have limited resources and chasing skips is considered low priority. Many counties are faced with a massive stock of unserved arrest warrants. In California alone there are about two million unserved arrest warrants including more than two hundred thousand felony arrest warrants and several thousand outstanding homicide warrants. Howe and Hallissy (1999) report that "local, state and federal law enforcement agencies have largely abandoned their job of serving warrants in all but the most

The Data The data is a random sample of felony filings from approximately 40 jurisdictions designed to represent the 75 most populous U.S. counties. The data covers 58,585 felony defendants from 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996 The data contains detailed information on: arrest charges the criminal background of the defendant sex and age of the defendant release type (surety, cash bond, own recognizance etc.) rearrest charges for those rearrested whether the defendant failed to appear and if so whether the defendant was still at large after one year

Mean FTA Rates by Release Category, 1988-1996 Own Recognizance Own Recognizance Deposit Bond Cash Bond Surety Bond 26% [20,944] Deposit Bond Cash Bond Surety Bond 5%* 5%* 9%* 21% [3,605] 1% 4%* 20% [2,482] 3%* 17% [9,198] Mean FTA rates for release categories are along the main diagonal with the number of observations in square brackets. Off diagonal elements are the difference between the mean FTA rate for the row category and the mean FTA rate for the column category. * Statistically significant at the greater than 1% level.

In Search of In Search of Schrödinger's Defendant One reason for lower FTA rates may simply be selection. Bail bondsmen "cream-skim" for those least likely to FTA. Necessity of finding “comparables.” The Matching Method Examples of factors that we control for: Arrest charges Criminal background Previous FTAs Age

Matching Necessity of finding “comparables.” Random assignment is ideal Weaker assumption is that treatment assignment is random conditional on some Xi This suggests an intuitive estimator – Ti (Y0i , Y1i ) X i match individuals across the conditioning ATE ( x) E (Yvariable. 1i X i x ) E (Y0 i X i x )

Matching on Propensity Score The matching method will quickly run into a problem because as we expand the number of matching variables the number of matching categories expands exponentially. Rosenbaum and Rubin showed how this problem could be overcome. What they showed is that if treatment is independent of outcome conditional on X Ti (Y0i , Y1i ) X i then it is also true that: T (Y0 , Y1 ) p ( X ) where p(X) is the probability that T 1 X also called the propensity score. Rosenbaum and Rubin showed that you could shrink the multi-dimensional problem of matching on many categories into a single dimensional problem of matching on the probability of treatment.

Intuition on Propensity Score Matching We would like to have random assignment which means that the X would be distributed identically across the two treatments. What matching on the propensity score does is to rebalance the sample so that X is balanced across the treatments and thus we recreate a sample that looks as if it were drawn randomly. The matching technique extends naturally to applications with multiple treatments through the use of a multi-valued propensity score with matching on conditional probabilities (Lechner1999,

Generating P-Scores We use an ordered probit model which includes the crime the defendant is alleged to have committed, whether the defendant had previous experience with the criminal justice system including whether the defendant had failed to appear in the past. Note that these are the sorts of variables that judges used to make their treatment assignments. Idea is that we will create an as if “random sample” based on these characteristics for each treatment group. We then match individuals across the treatment groups according to their p-scores using a caliper of .0001.

Treatment Effects of Row versus Column Release Category on FTA Rates using Matched Samples, 1988-1996 Own Recognizance Own Recognizance Deposit Bond Cash Bond Surety Bond 26% Deposit Bond -3.1* (-12%) 21% Cash Bond -5.8* (-22%) -1.5 (-7%) 20% Surety Bond -7.3* (-28%) -3.9* (-18%) 1.7 (8.5%) 17% Mean FTA rates for release categories for the full sample are along the main diagonal. Off diagonal elements are the estimated treatment effects of the row category versus the column category. * Statistically significant at the greater than 1% level (two sided).

Failure to Appear vs. Attempt to Escape Not every failure to appear is the result of an attempt to escape justice. In some cases, a defendant fails to appear because he forgets his trial date, gets sick, or is already in jail. A telephone call usually resolves these issues and the

The Fugitive Commercial bail is most different from other release types, including pretrial release bureaucracies, in tracking down defendants who have purposively skipped town. Recapture of purposeful skips is where we would expect to see the largest effects from surety release. Once a defendant has absconded, the efforts of the bail bondsman relative to the police are what determines differences in results.

Treatment Effect of Row versus Column Release Category on the Fugitive Rate using Matched Samples, Conditional on FTA, 1988-1996 Own Recognizance Deposit Bond Cash Bond Own Recognizance 32% [5440] Deposit Bond -.2 (.6%) 33% [766] Cash Bond 11.9* (37%) -3.8 (-11%) 40% [506] -17* (-53%) -15.5* (-47%) -25.6* (-64%) Surety Bond Surety Bond 21% [1537] Mean fugitive rates--defined as FTAs that last longer than a year—by release categories for the full sample are along the main diagonal with the number of observations in that category conditional on an FTA in square brackets. Off diagonal elements are the difference between the mean fugitive rate for the row category and the mean fugitive rate for the column category estimated using matching. * Statistically significant at the greater than 1% level (two sided). ** Statistically significant at the greater than 5% level. ** Statistically significant at the greater than 10% level.

Effect of Alternative Treatment versus Surety Bond Matching Individuals from States that have Banned Surety Bonds with Similar Individuals Released on Surety Bond, 19881996 Own Recognizance v. Surety Bond Deposit v. Surety Bond Cash v. Surety Bond Treatment Effect on FTA Rates 7.8* (30%) 6.2* (23%) -1.6 (-6%) Treatment Effect on Fugitive Rates 14.8* (78%) 19.8* (85%) 35.7* (93%) Standard errors are in parentheses. Matching Caliper .0001 * Statistically significant at the greater than 1% level (two sided). ** Statistically significant at the greater than 5% level. *** Statistically significant at the greater than 10% level.

Kaplan-Meier Estimation of FTA duration We estimate a Kaplan-Meier model of the duration of an FTA spell. The analysis is conducted on days at large and is truncated at one year. The Kaplan-Meier estimator is a nonparametric estimate of the survivor function: the probability that an individual survives in the current state. Note, however, that we compare matched samples so our

Estimation of Time to Recapture

A “Twins” Study We look at individuals who were released on their own recognizance the first time they got arrested and who were then arrested again. We then compare the fugitive rates on the first charge for those who got own-own with those who got own-surety. The reasoning here is that if the bond dealers make the defendant stick around for the second charge then this creates a unintended benefit on the first charge – the defendant can't skip town on one charge but not the other. At the same time we are comparing individuals both of whom were released on

A “Twins” Study: Results Unconditional Fugitive Rates by Arrest-Rearrest Category, 1988,1990 1) Own and Not 2) Own-Own 3) Own-Surety Rearrested Fugitive 8.48 8.04 1.49 Rate [17,828] [191] [134] Own-Own indicates first release on own recognizance and second release on own recognizance. Own-Surety indicates first release on own recognizance, second release on surety.

Bounties for Justice: History and New Directions Private incentives used to be used to much greater extent in law enforcement and even in war. During the revolutionary war and the war of 1812, “privateers” were the main offensive weapon of the United States on the high seas. Privateers were private vessels licensed by the US government with a “letter of marque and reprisal” to capture enemy vessels and keep their cargo (after taxes!) as bounty. Privateers were not pirates they were legally recognized by all countries until well into the 19th century. In the war of 1812 privateers were very successful, capturing thousands of British ships at a time when the American Navy was ineffectual.

Bounties for Justice: New Directions The success of the commercial bail system suggest that we ought to look for other areas to apply the bounty concept. Privatization of Warrant Service Recall that there are 2.5 million unserved arrest warrants in CA – many for serious charges. Put a bounty on serving these warrants. Parole Bonds FTAs and Fugitives are common for parolees and probationers just as for felony defendants. Some 10% of probationers have absconded. Probation and parole officers are strained and understaffed. Felony defendants can be required to pay bail to be released. Why not require probationers and parolee’s to pay parole bond?

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Bounties in Other Fields Microsoft has a 5 million fund for the payment of bounties. They recently paid 250,000 for information that led to the conviction of the author of the Sasser virus. Bounties could also be offered to help capture illegal spam emailers. Prizes for ideas and accomplishments.

Summary Defendants released on surety bond are 28 percent less likely to fail to appear than similar defendants released on their own recognizance. If they do fail to appear, they are 53 percent less likely to remain at large for extended periods of time. Deposit bonds perform only marginally better than release on own recognizance.

Summary (con’t) Requiring defendants to pay their bonds in cash can reduce the FTA rate but conditional on FTA the fugitive rate is much lower on surety bond. Given that a defendant skips town the probability of recapture is much higher for those defendants on surety bond. The bounty concept ought to be extended to privatized warrant service and probation and parole bonds.