‘Unconscionable.’ How a surge in domestic violence is saving the bail bond industry
Domestic violence is keeping the bail bond industry alive in Sacramento.
Roughly 42% of all of the people who bonded out of jail since April were released while facing at least one charge related to domestic violence. At least 569 alleged abusers — in some cases, the partners they are accused of beating — paid cash bail to get out of Sacramento jails, a review of county data shows.
Early in the pandemic, California’s Judicial Council excluded domestic violence from an emergency order that set bail at $0 for many offenses. The order, which ended in June but was extended in Sacramento and several other counties, was intended as a way to clear space in jails and help stem the spread of COVID-19.
Alleged violent offenders, among others, were still required to pay cash bail or stay locked up. But in a cruel twist, experts and law enforcement officials say, some of the burden of paying bail has likely fallen on domestic violence victims themselves.
Incidents of domestic violence are widely suspected to have surged in the months since California’s stay-at-home orders took effect, with many cases kept hidden behind closed doors.
Of the cases that have led to an arrest, experts fear victims who are forced to rely on their abusers for shelter and financial support have been paying their abusers’ bail as a pandemic wreaks havoc on vulnerable and disadvantaged communities.
Records show the bond industry in Sacramento County was barely affected by the pandemic or the cashless bail order. Bond companies fronted $87.4 million in the five months following the emergency order, more than was posted in the same period last year.
In interviews, bond agents themselves said domestic violence cases helped backfill their ledgers.
And in some months, the number of posted bonds actually increased compared to previous years, data shows. Bonds posted for a suspected surge in domestic violence suspects may have ultimately erased any gaps created by the $0 emergency order altogether.
Lee Seale, Sacramento County’s Chief Probation Officer, called the situation “unconscionable.”
“It is an enormous amount of money being pulled out of mostly minority and low-income communities,” Seale said, “particularly during a time when so many are facing economic distress and the threat of joblessness and homelessness.”
The review of bond and domestic violence data casts new light on what changed and what did not at a time when voters are determining the future of money bail altogether. It suggests the bond industry has thrived in a pandemic while its very fate hangs in the balance with Proposition 25 on the November ballot, which would eliminate cash bail completely.
In the earliest days of the pandemic, and with their very existence threatened, the bail bond industry fiercely opposed setting bail in California at $0 for several offenses as a way to lessen the jail population and slow the spread of COVID-19.
“No virus is going to stop us from doing our jobs,” the industry declared.
Two week later, California did, indeed, institute $0 bail across the state.
The state and county court record-keeping systems are notoriously fragmented and antiquated, making it difficult to collect precise data on bail trends.
But information from the Sacramento County Probation Department, the sheriff’s office and local courts reviewed by The Bee, along with more than a dozen interviews with county officials, domestic violence case workers, researchers and bail bondsmen, indicate a significant brunt of bonds that filled any gap created by the $0 order are tied back to domestic violence.
In Sacramento County, the Superior Court case management system is “very antiquated” and difficult to query bond information from, said Kim Pedersen, a spokeswoman. Nevertheless, court records show criminal domestic violence case filings nearly doubled from 75 to February, before the pandemic’s effects really began, to 140 in August.
The local Public Defender’s Office declined to comment for this story because it needed time to study the data, and the District Attorney’s Office, which prosecutes domestic violence cases, also declined to comment.
‘Money out of family resources’
The most common way to post a bond and get released from jail is to work with bail bond companies that have agreements with the courts. If, for example, someone is arrested and a bond is set at $50,000, the person bailing them out typically needs to arrange to pay 10% to the bond company, or $5,000.
The money is nonrefundable, even if charges are later reduced or the case is dismissed.
Bail bond companies typically arrange payments with partners, family and friends of the defendant, rather than the person who is actually in jail. That means the burden to put up money and sign long-term payment plan agreements often falls on women or other family members in low-income communities of color, said Joshua Page, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota who has studied the bond industry.
“This is often a significant amount of money that’s coming out of the family’s resources,” he said. “It’s really substantial.”
Superior Court data shows the number of people who bonded out of jail plummeted in March, before the $0 bail order took effect. The exodus largely happened while swaths of society were frozen in place, jail bookings themselves slowed significantly, and the courts, attorneys and law enforcement sought other ways to ease jail crowding.
Since then, the number of people posting bonds has rebounded and even exceeded some tallies from the same timeframe in recent years, records show.
Topo Padilla, president of the Golden State Bail Agents Association, said he was surprised to learn from a Bee reporter the number of bonds posted in the county had held so steady from 2019 and into the pandemic.
“The bail industry didn’t see a decline like we thought we would see,” Padilla said. “I, unfortunately, think that’s due to an uptick in domestic violence and other crimes. People were getting desperate.”
Padilla, who works at Greg Padilla Bail Bonds downtown, declined to share specifics about how many bonds he had posted related to domestic violence and deferred to data maintained by the District Attorney’s Office. The district attorney’s office, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment because it would be “speculating.”
Elena Norlie, manager at Sacramento Bail Bonds, said the overall number of bonds her office handled dropped by almost half after the emergency order eliminated bonds for thefts and other relatively minor crimes. But the number of domestic violence cases increased significantly.
“I’d say domestics went up in our office probably about 30%,” she said. “Most of the ones that we were posting were domestic violence.”
Few choices for domestic violence survivors
Any increase in the number of domestic violence arrests could mean an increase in victims needing to find ways to pay to get a partner out of jail due to existing financial necessity, said Julie Bornhoeft, chief strategy and sustainability officer at WEAVE, a crisis intervention service in Sacramento County.
She said WEAVE has documented a surge in cases that are “concerning but not surprising.”
A woman might be the primary caretaker for children while a partner works and pays for food or housing — a difficult situation made worse during a pandemic that has damaged the economy and forced mass layoffs.
Sacramento’s tightening housing market and the financial nest egg needed to move only make it more difficult for victims to get out of dangerous situations. If an abusive partner is arrested, “it can compromise the whole foundation of the family,” Bornhoeft said.
“On the surface, it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “People question it. But you’ve got to look at the dynamics of what’s going on. That fear is a huge driving factor.”
On April 6, California’s Judicial Council set bail at $0 for most misdemeanor and some low-level felony offenses. The goal at the time was to allow for greater physical distancing at county jails, where two-thirds of people are being held before they’ve been convicted of a crime.
In addition to domestic violence, the $0 bail rule did not apply to many of the most common offenses including for people accused of violent or sexual crimes, felons in possession of firearms or those accused of driving under the influence.
The order — seen by some as a trial run for a more sweeping elimination of money bail in California under Proposition 25 — still allowed judges to raise or deny bail if there was a concern for public safety.
It came as counties clamored through March to find ways to ease jail populations on their own.
The combined efforts worked, resulting in the largest downsizing of California’s jail population in modern history. County jail populations dropped from about 72,000 to 51,000 people, according to the Board of State and Community Corrections.
In Sacramento County, the number similarly dropped by about one-third by mid-April, though it’s difficult to know precisely how many people were freed exclusively because of the emergency order and how many others were released through other agreements among courts, attorneys and law enforcement.
The sheriff’s office likewise reported 937 people accused of domestic violence have posted cash bonds since April, including 49 of whom were charged multiple times and posted multiple bails. The data, which was separate from the probation department’s information, and calculated slightly differently, likewise showed domestic violence accounting for about 40% of cash bonds being linked to domestic violence.
Some law enforcement officials say the $0 bail order has led to a revolving-door and fostered an increase in crime as the same person cycles in and out of jail. There have been isolated headline-grabbing anecdotes of people released on $0 bonds who later reoffended because they know they won’t likely face harsh penalties.
But a reliable analysis of the effect of cashless bail is still difficult to come by, said Heather Harris, a researcher at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. That’s mainly because there were so many other factors happening at the same time, including pandemic-related stay-at-home orders, civil unrest, and other economic uncertainty that often coincides with increases in reported crimes.
“There was a lot going on. It’s hard to disentangle all the pieces,” Harris said, adding that jail bookings were down and releases were increasing statewide at the time the order took effect.
Historically, research has found minority communities and even families of domestic violence survivors can end up bearing disproportionate costs of cash bail. Those groups are less likely to have the cash on hand to pay for those bonds and end up spending more time in jail or, conversely, working through bail bondsmen who charge nonrefundable fees to already cash-strapped defendants and their families.
More violence, more arrests, more bonds
Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018 signed into law sweeping legislation abolishing bail bonds and requiring counties to conduct a public safety assessment on people accused of crimes to help determine what threat they pose and whether someone should be released before their case concludes.
Brown’s elimination of cash bail was put on hold, pending the results of the Nov. 3 vote on Proposition 25.
Several court officials, local lawyers and even some advocates were puzzled by the steadiness in the number of bonds that were posted in the months after the emergency order. But, they said, the domestic violence link offsetting any gaps makes logical sense.
“Domestic violence has increased,” said Faith Whitmore, CEO of the Sacramento Regional Family Justice Center, a nonprofit that works with domestic violence survivors. “Thus arrests have increased, thus bail has continued.”
The Judicial Council ended the statewide $0 bail order in June. Sacramento County’s courts kept the terms in place indefinitely, as did 30 other jurisdictions.
Allison Kephart, WEAVE’s director of legal services, said it was difficult to know how many of the calls the center receives involve people who have bailed their partners out of jail. WEAVE’s callers are often seeking advice on how to get out of a relationship or resolve custody disputes over children rather than guidance on how to free someone from jail to maintain financial footing.
Still, it definitely happens, Kephart said. And lately, the type of reported violence is especially intense as abusers use tough financial situations as “leverage” over their partners.
“Any time there’s a disruption in the status quo,” Kephart said, “that often tends to be a place where abusers will try to use that to their advantage.”
This story was originally published October 12, 2020 at 5:00 AM.