I have been reading several rather long, drawn out studies relating the pros and cons of public vs. private law enforcement. There have been a number of studies done, I am not privy to all but I have been reading one in particular that seems to have made some interesting observations and come to, I think, interesting conclusions.
I won't try to drop all this on ya here but I will give you just a taste and if your interested in further research I will give you the links at the end of this post.
The article I am reading was written by two professors:
“The Fugitive: Evidence on Public versus Private Law Enforcement from Bail Jumping,” with Alex Tabarrok, Journal of Law and Economics. 47(1):93-122, 2004. and the second:
Alexander Tabarrok an associate professor of economics in the department of economics at George Mason University.Their paper basically put forth this Abstract:
"After being arrested and booked, most felony defendants are released to await trial. On
the day of the trial, a substantial percentage fail to appear. If the failure to appear is not
quickly explained, warrants are issued and two quite different systems of pursuit and
rearrest are put into action. Public police have the primary responsibility for pursuing
and rearresting defendants who were released on their own recognizance or on cash or
government bail. Defendants who made bail by borrowing from a bond dealer, however,
must worry about an entirely different pursuer. When a defendant who has borrowed
money skips trial, the bond dealer forfeits the bond unless the fugitive is soon returned.
As a result, bond dealers have an incentive to monitor their charges and ensure that they
do not skip. When a defendant does skip, bond dealers hire bail enforcement agents,
more colloquially known as bounty hunters, to pursue and return the defendants to
custody. We compare the effectiveness of these two different systems by examining
failure to appear rates, fugitive rates and capture rates of felony defendants who fall
under the respective systems. We apply propensity score and matching techniques."If you care to read the entire 54 page article the link is"
http://www.americanbailcoalition.com/pd ... rivate.pdf... and after the entire article... the conclusion at the end read:
Conclusions"When the default was for every criminal defendant to be held until trial, it was
easy to support the institution of surety bail. Surety bail increased the number of releases
relative to the default and thereby spared the innocent some jail time. Surety release also
provided good, albeit not perfect, assurance that the defendant would later appear to stand
trial. When the default is that every defendant is released, or at least when many people
believe that "innocent until proven guilty" establishes that release before trial is the ideal,
support for the surety bail system becomes more complex. How should the probability of
failing to appear and all the costs this implies, including higher crime rates, be traded-off
against the injustice of imprisoning the innocent or even the injustice of imprisoning the
not yet proven guilty? We cannot provide an answer to this question but we can provide
a necessary input into this important debate.""Defendants released on surety bond are 28 percent less likely to fail to appear than
similar defendants released on their own recognizance and 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. Requiring defendants
to pay their bonds in cash can reduce the FTA rate to a similar rate than that for those
released on surety bond. Given that a defendant skips town, however, the probability of
recapture is much higher for those defendants on surety bond. As a result, the probability
of being a fugitive is 64 percent lower for those released on surety bond compared to
those released on cash bond. These finding indicate that bond dealers and bail enforcement
agents ("bounty hunters") are effective at discouraging flight and at recapturing defendants."... and the last sentence in the conclusion being....
"Bounty hunters, not public police, appear to be the true long arms of the law."I post this here in the public arena for your observation only... I do not agree or disagree with the above statistics... I merely post them here for your thoughts.
