Animal Terrorists! ACLU Weenies! Bail Bondsmen Preying on the Poor–What?

Pat Powers pauses the press-release parade to go ape over an impending wave of anonymous animal rights "terrorism" that's going to crash into South Dakota any moment now.

Reality check: cutting a fence to release farm mink sixteen years ago and pouring paint on the Iowa Butter Cow are crimes, but they aren't terrorism. (A cow made of 600 pounds of butter recycled for as much as ten years is itself rather terrifying.)

Powers then grumbles from his armchair about the ACLU's armchair-quarterbacking the Pierre incident in which a police officer tasered a suicidal, knife-wielding eight-year-old girl. The South Dakota ACLU points out that more than 500 people have died after being tasered by police since 2001, which is a grim fact giving cause to question the use of such aggressive force, not a "hysterical screed," as Powers would dismiss it.

Powers needs to keep up his litany of potshots at liberal groups like the ACLU, because they point out truths his sponsors find unpleasant... truths like the unequal justice meted out to low-income folks, thanks in part to the commercial bail industry that preys on the poor:

The average bail amount is nearly $90,000. If you don't happen to have this amount sitting in your bank account, odds are you'll need to borrow it from a bail bondsman, like Eric Amparan. Here's the catch: Eric will keep 10% of this amount as his non-refundable fee, even if you're found innocent. So you pay almost $9,000 to get out of jail if you're poor or middle class, but you pay nothing if you're rich.

Bail is not a fine. It is not supposed to be used as punishment. The traditional purpose of bail is simply to ensure that people will return for their court date. But the commercial bail industry's business model is to make it more expensive for people of lesser means to move through the criminal justice system [Jesse Lava and Sarah Solon, "Should It Cost Less to Get out of Jail If You're Rich?" ACLU: Blog of Rights, 2013.10.15].

$90,000? Really. And that high bail doesn't really address the problem of making sure defendants show up for court:

...the average bail amount for people who are detained has more than doubled from $39,800 in 1992 to $89,900 in 2006. This is despite evidence that higher bail amounts are not related to more public safety and that people who are unable to afford money bail are often a lower risk of dangerousness or failure to appear in court – the two legal justifications to incarcerate someone pretrial – than those who can make bail [Melissa Neal, "Bail Fail: Why the U.S. Should End the Practice of Using Money for Bail," Justice Policy Institute, 2012.09.11].

Different systems of justice or rich and poor—that doesn't sound fair to me. I won't leap from my armchair and call it capitalist terrorism against the working class. But I'll mention it, criticize it, and wonder what we'll hear on the subject from Pat Powers, who cahootsifies so closely with his dear friend and patron Senator Dan Lederman, who makes his living as a bail bondsman in Iowa.