Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given - Duane Dog Chapman [82]
Regardless of the state’s opinion, a bail bondsman offers a tremendous system of checks and balances. Because we secure bonds with a family member, a car, a house, or something of equal or greater value to the bond, we are also providing a “get out of jail card,” but not for free. We will only get you out if you make a promise that you can financially back yourself up. If you can’t pay for the crime, then you will do the time. Period. I personally see to that.
And if you can’t pay the bail and act in a responsible way, I will take your momma’s house and see to it that you can’t get out of jail to commit more crimes. Repeat offenders should never be offered pretrial services—ever. The only people I believe qualify for this type of program and to be released on a personal release bond are first-time offenders who have never been in trouble before, have no criminal history, have committed a nonviolent crime, and have no reason to be looked at further than the jailhouse interview.
Illinois, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Oregon are the only states in the union that do not allow bail bonds—they’ve actually outlawed them. They are the 10-percent-to-the-state states, meaning a defendant puts up 10 percent of their bail to the state instead of a bondsman. They only use the pretrial release program, which in my opinion has been absolutely disastrous for them. Thousands of victims will never get closure on their cases because their assailants have disappeared. In Chicago alone there are thousands of open cases on the books because the defendants cannot be found and they don’t convict in absentia. It has to be terribly frustrating for anyone trying to bring a fugitive to justice in those states, because the pretrial release program works against them.
Bounty hunting has been outlawed in Oregon since 1974, but recently the state has seen the error of its ways and is now trying to bring bail bonds and bounty hunting back. The bill has already cleared the House and is set to head to the full Senate for consideration. Senator Jason Atkinson actually said, “In the faint hope of meeting Dog the Bounty Hunter, I will vote yes.”
The state government in Oregon has recognized how much money it has wasted because it can’t bring fugitives to justice. If it allows bounty hunting, I can find these guys so that their cases can go forward and the victims can be vindicated. Case closed. The state gets the revenue from the fines and crime goes down. I would volunteer my time to help any one of these states get its system in order so it could start making money on crime instead of losing it.
It used to be that the prison system was about incarceration and rehabilitation. Unfortunately, there’s only incarceration these days. There are no Tony Robbins courses in jail to help the inmates become rehabilitated, functioning members of society when they get out. We aren’t educating the inmates, teaching them how to read and write, or making sure they have a skill set when they’re released, so we aren’t preparing them to reenter a world where they have to make decisions all on their own. Their lack of decision-making skills is what landed most of these guys in the clink in the first place, so why on earth would we not offer them some type of program to help teach these inmates the skills they’ll need to not only survive but thrive on the outside?
We break them down but never build them back up. There are some people who think we shouldn’t offer prisoners anything—that they made their bed and now they have to lie in it. But to the prisoners I say, “Who cares what they think? You committed a crime, but you don’t get to lie around doing nothing.” That