The Professional Bondsmen of Texas- Blog

  Right on Crime is a national campaign of the Texas Public Policy Foundation in partnerhsip with the American Conservative Union Foundation and Prison Fellowship, that supports conservative solutions for reducing crime, restoring victims, reforming offenders and lowering taxpayer costs.  The movement was born in Texas in 2007. TPPF is a conservative think tank based in Austin, Texas.  The organization was founded in 1989.   The stated mission of TPPF is "to promote and defend liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise in Texas and the nation by educating and affecting policymakers and the Texas public policy debate with academically sound research and outreach." TPPF does a lot of good work in Texas outside the area of pretrial criminal justice reform where the group created a nationwide project called "Right on Crime."  The Professional Bondsmen of Texas has been writing a series of articles highlighting the many failures of Right on Crime and ...

  From the Albuquerque Journal- March 13, 2022. Billionaire John Arnold, who calls himself a “special interest pot stirrer,” has decided to join New York City – which is suffering through a crime wave with its new arrest and release program – to meddle in the issue of bail reform. As part of Arnold’s scheme to remake the criminal justice system by releasing criminals before they are tried, he created a “Public Safety Assessment” (PSA) tool, which is basically a formula that is supposed to assess whether suspects are safe to be released before their trials. (The tool is used by judges in Bernalillo County’s Second Judicial District.) According to Arnold’s website, it is “a risk assessment tool that helps judges make accurate, efficient, and evidence-based decisions about which defendants should be detained prior to trial and which can be safely released.” New York City’s program differs insofar as the state has simply barred police from detaining criminals for most offenses. But the...

    A teenage double murder suspect has been freed on an ankle monitor after a judge used a woke bail reform group's 'safety tool' to decide he posed little risk to society. Adrian Avila, 18, walked out of prison Tuesday after Albuquerque district judge Stanley Whitaker ruled that prosecutors could not prove that Avila posed a threat to the community despite having evidence that linked the teen to two separate killings. He will be required to wear a GPS ankle monitor at all times and must adhere to a curfew. It was deployed by courts in New Mexico and 2017, with the Arnold Foundation's website saying that it seeks to 'eliminate unjust pretrial detention and create a justice system where jail is only used when absolutely necessary.'  At the time of its introduction, research surrounding the assessment showed that suspects who were considered low and medium risk were apt to commit more crimes if they were imprisoned for a long stretch. The controversial tool helps...

  While bail as a pretrial release mechanism has been around since our nation’s beginning and is protected in the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, its continued use in the present day has been questioned by critics of the historically-based pretrial release mechanism. In a recent study, David Krahl, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at The University of Tampa, found that in terms of sheer cost alone, the use of surety bonding costs Florida taxpayers absolutely nothing in terms of taxpayer dollars, while the use of other forms of unsecured pretrial release has cost more than $95 million dollars over a three-year period. Krahl’s research, using a random sample of over 9,300 detainees from jails across Florida during a one-year period, showed that 56 percent of defendants who had been arrested spent between one and three days in jail, while two-thirds of the sample spent between one and seven days in jail before they were released. The data also showed that ...

PBT has several call to action campaigns taking place currently.  If you would like to participate and help us in educating the members of the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, you can visit our current call to actions: Call to Action No. 2-  Opposing Risk Assessments in General  CLICK HERE Call to Action No. 3- Opposing PRAISTX  CLICK HERE  

  Please Join Us April 6, 2021 at the Texas Capitol to Oppose HB 20 Dear PBT Members and Supporters, HB 20 by Murr and several other bills, have been set for a hearing on April 6, 2021 at 1:00 pm. We are calling for all avaialbe PBT Members and supporters to join us in Austin, Texas that day. We will be limited on the number of people who can testify regarding the bill because of the pandemic. But you can still help us with your pen. This is what we need: PBT Members and Supporters of PBT should travel to Austin to sign cards in opposition to HB 20 on April 6, 2021. You should plan to arrive at 10:00 am at the Crowne Plaza located at  6121 N Interstate Hwy 35, Austin, TX 78752. We will have people in the lobby to direct groups to travel to the Capitol to get you through security. Once in the Capital you will be directed to the cafeteria where other PBT members will assit you in signing cards in opposition to the bills we oppose. We cannot stress to you the power of our members...

  House Bill 20 by Murr is the Governor's bill for proposed bail reform.  It also relies upon a constitutional amendment set out in HJR 4 by Kacal to expand the list of offenses upon which bail may be held without bail.   The constitutional amendment  states that a person accused of a violent or sexual offense or "other offenses added by the legislature" may be denied bail pending trial under the existing requirments set out in the constitution regarding capital and other serious offenses.  In additional, the constitutional amendment adds several offenses where bail must be denied unless there is "clear and convincing" evidence that bail will ensure that the defendant will appear for court or ensure the safety of the community.  The crimes covered by this provision include a capital murder or sexual offense where the victim is younger than 17.  There is no "Romeo and Juliet" exception which is an affirmative offense under current law.  HB 20 ...

The Illusion of Risk Assessments:  The False Promises of the National Criminal Justice Reform Movement by Ken W. Good Much like a magic trick, over the past decade, the criminal justice reform movement has presented a great illusion to the public.  Magic is based upon misdirection, in which the audience is set-up to anticipate what will happen next.  So it is with reformers who have hoped to fool the public through sleight of hand.  Only in this case, it's not a rabbit they are pulling out of a hat, it is a risk assessment tool they have sold as the answer to bail reform.  Through its adoption and implementation, risk assessment has been presented as the one-size-fits-all solution.  But time and evidence has revealed that these tools are made up of many false promises. The purpose of bail is to ensure that a defendant will make all court appearances in a pending criminal case.  Generally, the bail amount is set high enough to ensure appearance, taking ...

by Ken W. Good Attorney at Law Magazine Published February 1, 2021 Texas has a bail problem, but it is not what is portrayed in the news. The issue is how to process large groups of people efficiently and cost effectively through the jails of our largest counties. Historically, this has been done through the use of individual magistration and bail schedules. The reason for this is that the cost of individually magistrating every person arrested in our largest urban areas is expensive. Reformers have advocated for alternatives to bail schedules that would also allow for the quick release of large numbers of defendants. These groups have focused on risk assessment tools and simple release. However, the reality of these alternatives have never gotten close to their expectations. Scientific studies have now caught up with the proposed use of risk assessments, concluding that they should not be a part of criminal justice reform. A recent article updated this past December by authors from Ha...

California Voters Reject California’s Proposal to Abolish Private Surety Bail System and Use Pretrial Risk Assessments On November 3, 2020, California asked its citizens whether to abolish the private surety bail system and replace it with a state wide risk assessment tool.  In a stunning defeat, the voters rejected Prop. 25. In 2018, the California Legislature passed Senate Bill 10, to ban private surety bail and to replace it with a state wide expensive risk assessment tool procedure state wide.  The statute was not implemented until it was presented to the voters for adoption on November 3rd. In a stunning defeat, voters rejected the legislation.  The item on the ballot was Proposition 25. Community groups against Proposition 25 said in a statement after the election that voters “took heed of our alarms” about eliminating cash bail. “We warned our communities that if passed, Prop. 25 would automate racial profiling, give unchecked power to judges and increase f...

  The October Edition of the PBT Quarterly Newsletter.  This edition of the newsletter addresses:   The Four Failures of Risk Assessments: Failure No. 1:  Risk Assessments were Rushed to Use Without Proper Understanding Failure No. 2:  Risk Assessments are Wrong Much of the Time Failure No. 3:  Risk Assessments Set Defendants Up for Failure Failure No. 4:  Risk Assessments are No Longer Worth The Risk

Failure No. 4:  Risk Assessments are No Longer Worth the Risk The application of a Risk Assessment Tool into the pretrial criminal justice system was first advocated by reform activists.  It was intended to be an automated tool that would replace the need for using the private bail industry.  Also, some would say that the tool was intended to take away judicial discretion to add more uniformity to the pretrial release process across jurisdictions.  It was intended the tool would tell the court who should be released, who should be detained and who was on the bubble of release or detention.  Further, as the largest technology companies in the world have now demonstrated, the risk assessment tool was rushed and never properly studied before its release. Now how many years later, all of the initial advocates who supported the use of these tools no longer support the use of risk assessment tools.  The reason for this is because numerous studies have been releas...

Failure No. 3:  Risk Assessments Set Defendants Up For Failure A system that gives a defendant a false sense of security to the extent that the defendant will not be held accountable for their actions is a system that sets the defendant up for failure because the defendant will come to conclude that it is okay to commit further crimes until the total number of crimes or the severity of the crimes grows to such a point that they are facing more substantial penalties.  The Vera Institute recently meet with a group of judges arguing for a greater use of pretrial release bonds.  The representative made the statement that any reform of the criminal justice reform would result in an average failure to appear rate of approximately 40% and this number should be acceptable.  This statement reveals a lot about where the advocates for change are and where they want to go.  People within the Criminal Justice System know that a 40% failure to appear rate would cause substant...

Failure No. 2:  Risk Assessments are Wrong Much of the Time Using an algorithm to make predictions about risk of failure to appear and risk of commiting a new crime is fraught with problems.  As early as 2017, it was pointed out that when big data contains bad data, it can lead to big problems for organizations that use that data.  Nate Silver who makes a living at making predictions after reviewing data has been quoted as saying, "We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information-- and that means the real skill now is learning who to pick out the useful information from all this noise." The issues that cause risk assessment tools to be wrong much of the time fall into two areas:  (1) data issues; and (2) systemic algorithm issues.  The first area that can make risk assessments wrong is when the data that is put into and considered by the risk assessment is incorrect.  These issues fall into several areas.  In ju...