Colorado Coalition Helps Defeat Bail Bondsmen Bailout

From the perspective of bail bondsmen, Colorado's Proposition 102 was a pretty sweet deal: by barring the release of all but those arrested for the first time, or for a non-violent misdemeanor, from being eligible for release without bail, the ballot initiative would ensure a steady new stream of revenues for those who profit off the criminal justice system. Encouragingly, though, a broad coalition of groups from the ACLU and advocates for the poor to the County Sheriffs of Colorado -- as well as both district attorneys and criminal defense lawyers -- came out strong against the effort to enrich bail bondsmen by ballot, prompting voters to reject the initiative by a 2-1 margin.

"Voters have stood up to this special interest group, and have sent a strong message that Colorado taxpayers have no interest in funding a bailout of the bail bonds industry," the coalition declares on its website. "The voters saw through the clandestinely-funded efforts of the bail bond industry and attempts to mislead and scare them into supporting this measure."

And what a misleading scare campaign it was. Pull up the bail bondsmen-funded website of "Safe Streets Colorado" and you'll see an armed man engaging in a home invasion and apparently holding a family hostage, a not-so-subtle message that if Coloradans didn't vote to keep more of their fellow citizens behind bars, then their family just might, I don't know, be raped and murdered. "Many of these defendants fail to appear for their trials and become fugitives," the site declares, "and some do the unthinkable." Gasp! Do you know where your children are? (Indefensible and curiously citation-free fearmongering aside, though, at least the intruder they depict is a white guy -- progressive!)

Laughably, the push to do away with a judge's discretion to release a defendant without bail was also cast as an act of altruism, not self-interest, on the part of the state's morally upstanding bail bondsmen.

“We banded together as fellow bail bond agents because we really know what does work and what has worked,” bondsman Bobby Brown told Colorado Springs newspaper The Gazette. “It’s not a situation that this initiative is something that was dreamed up in order to increase [our] monetary gain." The bondsmen's website even implies taxpayers would save "tens of MILLIONS of dollars" from the initiative, claiming that allowing innocent-until-proven-guilty defendants to leave jail without posting bond is a de facto tax subsidy for violent crime.

A minor detail? The state's Legislative Council estimated the initiative would cost taxpayers an additional $2.8 million a year thanks to the financial burden of housing and feeding defendants who couldn't post bail. But as Citizens to Protect Colorado Communities spokeswoman Stefanie Clark put it, the bondsman's campaign was never "about public safety," it was "about profit."

There's a lot to be discouraged about around election time, but it's good to know that at least some voters are capable of seeing through well-funded distortions and rejecting a faux-"tough on crime" measure -- and that outspoken activism and coalition building can defeat a national lobby intent on ensuring its financial well-being through the public purse.

Photo Credit: Jeremy Brooks