ALEC is even involved in this: NPR: Bail Burden Keeps U.S. Jails Stuffed With Inmates

[highplainsdem]

http://www.npr.org/2010/01/21/122725771/Bail-Burden-Keeps-U-S-Jails-Stuffed-With-Inmates

This is about the bail bond business, and it's horrifying.

And ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which I've posted about elsewhere, is also involved in this. Check the sidebar for this story:

Bail Bonds and State Laws

The regulation of bail bond agents varies widely across the country. Many states require bondsmen to be licensed. Generally, bond agents must undergo eight to 16 hours of training, submit to fingerprinting and a background check and be a resident of the state to receive a license. However, some states do not require bondsmen to be licensed. In Wyoming, for example, agents using their own capital are not required to be licensed.

Some states ban commercial bail bondsmen outright and have the state's court act as the bail bond business. But in others, the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization backed in part by the bail bond lobby, has worked to pass the Citizen's Right To Know Act, a law that requires reformatting and increased reporting of pretrial release information and encourages the use of commercial bail bondsmen.

I found this article after checking out the American Bail Coalition, after seeing it had not not one but two of the members (Carmichael and Watson) on ALEC's Private Enterprise Board:

http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Private_Enterprise_Board&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=14499

Board Members

Ms. Sano Blocker, Energy Future Holdings
Mr. Don Bohn, Johnson & Johnson
Mr. Jeff Bond, PhRMA
Mr. Bill Carmichael, American Bail Coalition
Mr. Derek Crawford, Kraft Foods, Inc.
Mr. John Del Giorno, GlaxoSmithKline
Mr. Michael Hubert, Pfizer Inc
Ms. Teresa Jennings, Reed Elsvier
Mr. Ken Lane, DIAGEO
Mr. Bill Leahy, AT&T
Mr. Kelly Mader, Peabody Energy
Mr. Richard McKardle, UPS
Mr. Bernie McKay, Intuit, Inc.
Mr. Mike Morgan, Koch Industries, Inc.
Ms. Sandy Oliver, Bayer Healthcare
Mr. David Powers, Reynolds American Inc.
Mr. Gene Rackley, Coca-Cola Enterprises
Ms. Maggie Sans, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Mr. Russell Smoldon, Salt River Project
Mr. Toby Spangler, Altria Client Services, Inc.
Mr. Roland Spies, State Farm Insurance Co.
Mr. Jerry Watson, American Bail Coalition

So ALEC is not only involved in anti-union legislation and legislation to roll back all sorts of regulations on businesses, including environmental regulations -- it's keeping US jails overflowing, for the profit of these bondsmen.

From the NPR article:

-snip-

A block away from the jail, Steve Henderson runs Lubbock's parole and pretrial release program from a small, dark office. He says his shoestring budget can't afford an officer at the jail. He can't even afford to accept collect calls from inmates looking for pretrial help.

-snip-

He says the bail bondsmen don't want to see his program receive anything more than limited funding. The bondsmen "make money and they contribute their influence," Henderson says. "I would do more if we had the funding to do more."

It's not that Lubbock's bondsmen want Henderson's clients. They don't. Henderson's clients can't afford a bondsman's fees.

But Henderson says the bondsmen lobby to keep his program as small and unproductive as possible, so that no paying customers slip though — even if that means thousands of inmates like Raymond Howard and Leslie Chew wait in jail at taxpayer expense, because they never find the money to become paying customers.

-snip-

The article also quotes a Lubbock bond company office manager bragging about bullying that county official and making him back off, and talking about how they "take care of" the officials who take care of them -- not paying anyone off "per se" but supporting "the people who are trying to help our business."

This is sickening.

And this is just one more example of ALEC's corruption of government managing to stay mostly under the radar, no matter how much damage it does.


Link to the more general topic about ALEC:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x591230

[prairierose]

1. Where can we put all of this important info....

so people can see it/find it and keep track of it?

[highplainsdem]

2. I don't know. Maybe a new DU group about ALEC, specifically to track what it's doing?

I just posted in another topic about Colorado passing a bad health care law, where someone had posted a reply saying Tennessee had just posted a bad bill, that ALEC was behind that, too:

http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_196197.asp

This is definitely a coordinated effort to get as much of ALEC's model legislation into law in as many states as possible, in as short a time as possible. It's a legislative blitz.

[brewens]

3. We have a bail bondsman that also was a bar owner for years.

Can you guess how that worked out? Someone, (gee I wonder who) would call in drunk driver tips to the cops. He'd be to the police station to bail them out real quick. I was always surprised that he didn't get hurt. Armed or not he'd have been an easy ambush for someone looking to settle the score.

[mod mom]

4. k & r

[ProgressiveProfessor]

5. It is a dirty business prone to fraud and civil rights violations

Every time I even glance at a Dog the Bounty hunter show I wonder why they are not arrested or shot for some of their stunts.

I damn near shot a bounty hunter once and I have had repo men jailed. They groups both seem to have poor target identification skills, low intelligence, and mean streaks. They get really upset when some one hands it back to them.