Criminal Bail Research Paper

Bail in the United States
In the mid 1900’s, the United States reformed what is known as bail. Bail is commonly known to assist defenders to get out of jail before the trial date. With the reintroduction of bail, many methods ensure that the court system is fair and runs fluently. Bail has many components such as its purpose, release procedures, six types and issues.
The purpose of bail was both to allow potentially innocent defendants to go free, while also providing a reason for them to come back to attend court. Bail is “known as a cash bond or other form of security that is provided to the court to ensure the appearance of the defendant at every stage of the criminal justice process, especially trial” (Siegel, 2017). Sometimes an offender

There are a few main drawbacks of bail, which include, bondsmen/bounty hunters, pretrial detention conditions, preventive detention, and pretrial services. (Siegel, 2017) Although trained bondsmen, and Bounty hunters provide an excellent way to find the offenders who skip out on bail, there are some untrained ones out there that use brutal strategies to capture the defendant that end in tragedy. According to The National Institute of Bail Enforcement in the United States they attempt to provide training to all bounty hunters. However, some fall through the cracks, which results in some fatal outcomes. When defendants aren’t eligible to post bail they are sent to a pretrial detention center in the local jail. These conditions in the detention centers are poor and the defendant is more likely to get longer sentences, due to the low rate of rehabilitation in the jail systems. According to the The Essentials of Criminal Justice “A federally sponsored study of case processing in the nation’s largest countries found that about 63 percent of all defendants granted bail were convicted” (Siegel, 2017). Preventive Detention is where defendants are in jail all the way up to the trial date without bail, because they are a more dangerous criminal. Preventive Detention is a good and bad thing, although only a few number of states follow this type of control. It’s simply put in place to assure that the dangerous defendant can’t go

The Manhattan Bail Project is one bail reform that was created in 1961. It stated that if the court had reliable background info about the defendant, then it would help make a reasonable judgement about the defendant in terms of whether they would returned to court or not. This can also be known as the Release on Recognizance. Since the ROR programs had such success in the 1960’s it resulted in the bail reforms to establish the Federal Bail Reform Act of 1966. It’s stated that the Federal Bail Reform Act “Established the presumption of ROR that must be overcome before money bail is required, and authorized by 10 percent deposit bail” (Smith, 2012). This results in critics thinking that the bail system is being unfair because defendant who are well off are able to make bail but the lower class can’t and end up stuck in there all the way to their court