We had asked the Pre-Trial Release Program for reports on the volume of bonds issued by that office and the number of defendants who had Failed To Appear (FTAs) for trial after being released.
We also asked for the cash total of the forfeited bonds, since the program issued them, there is no collateral for the county to collect.
Now, we knew that the Bail Bonds Board had initiated a strict collection policy on the private bail bond companies and ahd whittled the amount owed by 11 companies who were in arrears for FTAs to the tune of $32,972 in judgments among them.
In the graphic below one can see the list of defendants and the amounts of unsecured bonds (forfeitures) that the program issued for all of 2014. That number, by the way, is twice that of 2013.
While the private bond companies owe somewhere near $33,000, the Pre-Trial Release program is about $122,000 in arrears for bonds which cannot be collected from FTA defendants. That number would have been even greater ($193,00 if the bonds had not been recalled or collected, according to the notations to the right of the bond amounts. Click on graphic to enlarge).
However, in the reports posted by that office, they claim that they saved 88,756 days of having the defendants incarcerated resulting in a savings to the county of $3,550,240 in 2014 (at $40 a day per defendant out on bond).
They also report that they collected $115,597 in bond fees that went to the different courts.
Private bail bond companies scoff at these numbers, as they do at the number in the report that claims that the defendants out on bond earned an estimated $2,063,998 in salaries by not being incarcerated.
But there are other beneficiaries of the Pre-Trial Release Program. There is also a number of first-time offenders who qualified for the Pre-Trial Diversion Program that allows a defendant to enter the District Attorneys' program to have his conviction erased if they behave for the next five years.
In 2013, the report lists a total of 449 defendants placed in this program. In 2014, that number was 325. That's 774 in Pre-Trial Diversion at $500 a pop (the fee charged to participate in the program.
If you do the math, that's about $387,000 that went into the Pre-Trial Diversion Fund at the DA's Office.
What does that office do with that money? It's hard to tell since we have made some information requests and haven't gotten very far. However, a cursory look at the DA's salary schedule indicates that some of it goes to augment the salaries of the majority of its staff members.
In fact, line item 6002 and 6003 from that fund (600-5750) lists $265,000 and another $124,500 went into annual salaries for the staff. Transfers from other funds over the year (including the DA Forfeiture Fund) probably made up for the $389,500 total for salaries for the DA's staff.
So if the DA's folks are getting theirs and the folks at Pre-Trial Release claim they are getting all these benefits for the county, why complain, then?
Do we know what crimes the 32 defendants who absconded and Failed To Appear committed? Were there people charged with assault, burglaries, etc. on that list? Well, now they are out here among us.
1 comment:
Prosecution is profitable.
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