The Fugitive Evidence on Public versus Private Law Enforcement from Bail Jumping

1
The FugitiveEvidence on Public versus Private
Law Enforcement from Bail Jumping

• Eric Helland and Alexander Tabarrok

2
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.
• Defendants who fail to appear impose significant
  costs on others.

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• 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.

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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 commercial
  bond business has been one of the most tawdry
  parts of the criminal justice system. And the
  ABA suggests that "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

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Arguments Against Commercial Bail

• Unlike cash bond the fee for a surety bond is
  sunk, for this reason it's often asserted 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
  bondsman removes the incentive for the defendant
  to appear at trial."

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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 incentives
  compare to the incentives under other systems.

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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 you
  are pursued by

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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.

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Bounty Hunters versus the Police

• Public police bureaus are often strained for
  resources and the rearrest of defendants who FTA
  is low priority.
• The flow of arrest warrants for failure to appear
  has overwhelmed many police departments so that
  today many counties are faced with a massive
  stock of unserved arrest warrants.
• California has the largest backlog of arrest
  warrants in the nation. The California Department
  of Corrections estimated that as of December 1998
  there were more than two and a half million
  unserved arrest warrants including 2,600
  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 serious cases."

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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

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Table 2 Mean FTA Rates by Release Category, 1988-1996 Table 2 Mean FTA Rates by Release Category, 1988-1996 Table 2 Mean FTA Rates by Release Category, 1988-1996 Table 2 Mean FTA Rates by Release Category, 1988-1996 Table 2 Mean FTA Rates by Release Category, 1988-1996 Table 2 Mean FTA Rates by Release Category, 1988-1996
Own Recognizance Deposit Bond Cash Bond Surety Bond Emergency Release
Own Recognizance 26 20,944 5 5 9 -19
Deposit Bond 21 3,605 1 4 -23
Cash Bond 20 2,482 3 -25
Surety Bond 17 9,198 -28
Emergency Release 45 584
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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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.
• Consider the simplest case where i denotes a
  particular individual and there are two
  treatments. The treatment effect is -
  and the average treatment effect
• but we only ever observe (treated) or
  (untreated).
• Necessity of finding comparables.
• Random assignment
• Weaker assumption is that treatment assignment is
  random conditional on some Xi
• This suggests an intuitive estimator match
  individuals across the conditioning variable.

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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
• then it is also true that
• where p(X) is the probability that T1 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.

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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, Imbrens 1999).

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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 defenant 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.

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Treatment Effects of Row versus Column Release Category on FTA Rates using Matched Samples, 1988-1996 Treatment Effects of Row versus Column Release Category on FTA Rates using Matched Samples, 1988-1996 Treatment Effects of Row versus Column Release Category on FTA Rates using Matched Samples, 1988-1996 Treatment Effects of Row versus Column Release Category on FTA Rates using Matched Samples, 1988-1996 Treatment Effects of Row versus Column Release Category on FTA Rates using Matched Samples, 1988-1996
Own Recognizance Deposit Bond Cash Bond Surety Bond
Own Recognizance 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). 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). 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). 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). 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).
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Estimated Treatment Effects The Fugitive

• 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 defendant is back on trial within a
  couple of weeks.
• 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.

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Treatment Effect of Row versus Column Release Category on the Fugitive Rate using Matched Samples, Conditional on FTA, 1988-1996 Treatment Effect of Row versus Column Release Category on the Fugitive Rate using Matched Samples, Conditional on FTA, 1988-1996 Treatment Effect of Row versus Column Release Category on the Fugitive Rate using Matched Samples, Conditional on FTA, 1988-1996 Treatment Effect of Row versus Column Release Category on the Fugitive Rate using Matched Samples, Conditional on FTA, 1988-1996 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 Surety Bond
Own Recognizance 32 5440
Deposit Bond -.2 (.6) 33 766
Cash Bond 11.9 (37) -3.8 (-11) 40 506
Surety Bond -17 (-53) -15.5 (-47) -25.6 (-64) 21 1537
Mean fugitive rates, defined as FTAs that last longer than a year, for 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. Mean fugitive rates, defined as FTAs that last longer than a year, for 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. Mean fugitive rates, defined as FTAs that last longer than a year, for 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. Mean fugitive rates, defined as FTAs that last longer than a year, for 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. Mean fugitive rates, defined as FTAs that last longer than a year, for 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.
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Effect of Alternative Treatment versus Surety Bond on FTA and Fugitive Rates (conditional on FTA) Matching Individuals from States that have Banned Surety Bonds with Similar Individuals Released on Surety Bond, 1988-1996 Effect of Alternative Treatment versus Surety Bond on FTA and Fugitive Rates (conditional on FTA) Matching Individuals from States that have Banned Surety Bonds with Similar Individuals Released on Surety Bond, 1988-1996 Effect of Alternative Treatment versus Surety Bond on FTA and Fugitive Rates (conditional on FTA) Matching Individuals from States that have Banned Surety Bonds with Similar Individuals Released on Surety Bond, 1988-1996 Effect of Alternative Treatment versus Surety Bond on FTA and Fugitive Rates (conditional on FTA) Matching Individuals from States that have Banned Surety Bonds with Similar Individuals Released on Surety Bond, 1988-1996
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. 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. 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. 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.
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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 non-parametric
  estimate of the survivor function the
  probability that an individual survives in the
  current state. Note, however, that we compare
  matched samples so our KM estimator controls for
  covariates even though it is non-parametric.

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Estimation of Time to Recapture
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Looking for Unobservables

• 6 robustness tests in the main paper controlling
  for a variety of fixed effects, information
  observed by judge but not the econometrician, as
  well as general unobserved factors.
• Results are consistent across a wide variety of
  specifications.

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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 their own
  recognizance thus who should be especially
  comparable.

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Table 12 Unconditional Fugitive Rates by Arrest-Rearrest Category, 1988,1990 Table 12 Unconditional Fugitive Rates by Arrest-Rearrest Category, 1988,1990 Table 12 Unconditional Fugitive Rates by Arrest-Rearrest Category, 1988,1990 Table 12 Unconditional Fugitive Rates by Arrest-Rearrest Category, 1988,1990
1) Own and Not Rearrested 2) Own-Own 3) Own-Surety
Fugitive Rate 8.48 17,828 8.04 191 1.49 134
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. 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. 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. 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.
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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 unservered
  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
  probationiers just as for felony defendants.
  Some 10 of probationiers have absconded.
• Probation and parole officiers are strained and
  understaffed.
• Felony defendants can be required to pay bail to
  be released. Why not require probationiers and
  parolees to pay parole bond?

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Summary of Results

• 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.

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• 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.