Bail Blowback

I love how stupid the left can get. This time, we're talking about California eliminating "bail" from the criminal justice system. Oh my God is this hilarious. Observe.

For those who don't know, which is probably our readers in California, "bail" is an ancient aspect of the criminal justice system which lets people get out of jail before they are tried if they agree to put up collateral against their failure to appear at trial. Here's the thing: bail serves several purposes. First, it is a means for the state to allow people to get out of jail until they face trial, which in about 98% of cases never happens anyways. It lets the state do this because the person is required to put up collateral which they will not want to lose by running away. That is like a guarantee of good behavior. (Bail is set according to the financial ability of the person to pay to make sure that rich and poor have a similar incentive to show up.) Without it, letting people out pre-trial becomes much more risky.

What's more, most people only post a small portion of the bail, which they obtain from a bail agency. This also means that a separate, private sector "judge" looks at the person and decides if they are a reasonable risk worth lending the money too. If they agree, they pay the bail and the person posts only collateral, like the deed to a house. Think of it like a check on judges being too easy on criminals. Moreover, if the person does run away, then this private agency will chase them down and bring them back. That means the state doesn't need to watch them or hunt them down. See how bail helps?

But then, the left is the left and they have decided that bail must be racist because more peeps of color end up in jail (ignore that they commit more crimes), more peeps of color aren't offered bail (ignore that they commit worse crimes), and poor people obviously can't afford bail because they are poor (ignore the income test used to set the amount of bail or the fact bail money is almost always borrowed). Ignore the fact too that if you show up, you get your money back, so by obeying the law, bail is not harmful... it is, to the contrary, helpful. Ignore all that though. Bail is racist and must be purged like a statue from the past.

So a group of leftist activists have been pushing for the elimination of bail. California, being one f*cked up state, is where they've all settled and with the Democrats controlling everything, they just passed a bill to ban bail. Hurray! Here's the catch though: unless you are irrational (more in a moment) you need to replace bail with some system that decides who gets to walk free before trial and who doesn't. What California decided was to impose the logical requirement that judges would make this decision now based purely on a risk assessment -- are you a danger to others, are you a flight risk, etc.

The left freaked out.

See, California's liberal judges are racists who like to lock up peeps of color and poor people. By eliminating bail, California is now letting these racist judges decide who needs to be locked up just on their assessment of "who is scary." That of course means more peeps of color and more poor people will be locked up. And without bail to set them free, they will languish in jail. Damn those rich white people who got us to eliminate bail, which now twists the system in their favor and against peeps of color and the poor!! Those tricky racists!

I swear that if modern liberals ran the underground railroad, the final stop would have been a slave market in Atlanta.

(And just wait until people stop showing up for trial because they have nothing to lose and all those poor peeps of color get prison sentences from default judgments, and until California needs to start sending racist white cops to hunt these people down all across the country because there's no longer a bounty hunter industry in California. That won't happen to middle class whites because, uh, racism!)

Anyways, half the left turned against the bill in the end because getting rid of bail like this would be racist (who knew there could be consequences?). But part of the left didn't because bail is racist and they are making a statement by killing it -- a statement that they want more poor people and peeps of color locked up, apparently! (Who knew there could be consequences?)

So what exactly did the first group (who actually started the ball rolling on this) want? It turns out, they don't care about bail at all. They want incarceration eliminated (yep, no prisons) and they saw the elimination of bail as the first step in that direction. I told you they weren't rational.

What we have here is true irony. In the hopes of eliminating prison, the California left tried to destroy bail because they thought it was racist. They succeeded. But in succeeding, they will end up locking up more peeps of color and poor people because liberal California judges are racists and bail was the way poor people and peeps of color managed to escape the clutches of those racists. Tell me that's not worth a laugh!

Even funnier is how often this happens. Liberal "ideas" seem to be designed to do the most harm to the most vulnerable people in the shortest amount of time. Hence, most need to be fixed almost immediately once liberals finally discover what everyone else already knew -- that the thing "nobody could have foreseen" did indeed happen. But of course, then they try to fix their mistakes with more liberal "ideas" which only make the problems even worse. It's like deciding to punch bigger and bigger holes in the bottom of a sinking boat to let the flooding waters back out... and then being shocked when even more water starts coming in each new hole! "Who could have seen that happening?! Somebody do something!"

If we're lucky, California will push the button and shut down their jails. The ensuing chaos will be fun to watch as they play out John Carpenter's Escape from New York. Let's just hope they all know to kill each other in the right racial and gender proportions when that happens.