Breaking down the bail reform BS. My guest today is Mr Ken Good, a lawyer from Texas who's an expert on all things bail, bail reform and bonds. You're listening to The Last Gay Conservative. I'm your host, chad Law. Hello America, welcome to another episode of The Last Gay Conservative. It's me, chad Law, your host, america's binary brother, the holiest and most hated homo in America and the gayest conservative of all time, sending truth and common sense, conservative politics through the airwaves on our red, white and blue rainbow, the only rainbow that matters. Folks, looking forward to your texts and calls today, don't forget our phone number 866 Last Gay. That's 866, last Gay Text. Leave a message And more than likely I'll bring it up on air. Today's episode is sponsored by Factor Meals.

As you know, i've struggled with my weight my entire life. I'm finally on the right track. I'm almost down 80 pounds, most of it thanks to Factor Meals. I tried all the meal services before the weird freeze dried stuff, the boxes that come with all the loose ingredients that they want you to cook yourself. It all either tasted really crappy or took too much time. Factor Meals taste so good I crave my dinners and my lunches and they're healthy Keto, paleo however you eat. They can be customized for you. Right now, you can get 50% off your first order and then 20% off the next shipment after that. There's no excuse. Do yourselves a favor Go to factor75.com, fill out the quick questionnaire and they will deliver a meal specific for your needs that will help you lose weight. Don't forget factor75.com 50% off your first order and then an additional 20% off the order after that.

All right, folks, i've got a great interview lined up for you all today, talking about bale reform, an issue that I'm extremely passionate about, because the lefts calls to eliminate bale, eliminate bondsmen and to vilify everything in between, just to create chaos, is now having a serious effect on crime rates around the country. So I wanted to talk to an expert and I found Mr Ken Good. He's an incredibly successful attorney. He's argued cases before the Supreme Court of Texas and the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals, as well as the United States Court of Appeals, which is the Fifth Circuit which represents Texas. It's also the author of Goods on Bale, a practice guide created to bale industry professionals to help fight some of this constant nonsense. He's written hundreds of articles around what successful bale looks like and he still represents multiple bondsmen and private assurant insurance companies. There is no one better to talk about the issues.

Let's head over to the interview. All right, folks, i'm here. I'm joined with Mr Ken Good, who is an expert on all things bale bond and bond and bale reform. Ken, i hear you're from Abilene.

Oh my gosh. Yes, i grew up around Abilene in Eastland County, texas. I went to college at Hardin-Simons University. My brother was at McMurray University. I was born in Anson, which is just a little bit north of Abilene, so yeah, that's kind of a blast from the past And your parents were public school teachers.

They were My mom taught 31 years, 30 of them all in the same school. We probably moved to Gorman, texas, which is Eastland County, when I was in sixth grade And they just passed away three or four years ago after a car accident. So they were retired and still living in Gorman. Wow.

Let me just ask you we'll get back to this later, but I have a fun question to intro with which is unless you guys had some major big oil inheritance or something I'm assuming, growing up with two public school teachers, you had limited means.

Absolutely. I always tell the story that my parents came to us when we moved to Gorman And as public school teachers we qualified for free lunches And we decided as a family that we'd rather come home for lunch than take a free lunch, and I don't know why that is. I think that was my parents mindset and they encouraged us. But I grew up coming home for lunch from school because we preferred to do that than qualify for the free lunch, and I'm not being critical of people that take free lunches. That's just that's. We qualified for it. That's the way we were growing up.

I get it. So let me ask you this kind of silly question. But if you were in high school and you went and wanted some beer with your buddies and you went and robbed the local 7-11 or Circle K or whatever and you got arrested, would your parents be able to afford to put bail up for you?

So first of all, I would be dead after I got out Because, you know, my dad was diabetic, So he was pointed to the very first class of the Air Force Academy and did not get in because he was. They discovered he was diabetic And so we just never had alcohol in our house. I don't really drink. I have a very strong religious background, So I was never a drinker And so. But you know, stupid kids can do stupid things, And so if I did something like that, yeah, they would have bonded me out, but then they would have killed me.

Exactly Now, and the reason why I asked that is because, sadly, the bond, bail reform situation that we're hearing about has been, first of all, i think it's all mucked up together, which I really want to focus on the bail and bond side with you. I don't think criminal justice reform is, i think it's they're casting too wide of a net. But the reason why I ask you that is because here you are, from a blue collar family in Texas. You make a mistake. Your parents, more than likely you know, correct me if I'm wrong did not have the means to pay 100% cash, so they'd have to go to the local bondsman and put up 5, 10, 15%, whatever the down is, or the premium, and the bondsman would empower them to be able to get you out of jail without them having to, you know, put up 10 grand or whatever they wouldn't have.

That's right. That's right, That's exactly And that's what our system is based on, Like here in Texas the only constitutionally protected type of release is the private shirty system. So I mean we date back all the way to the Magna Carta. That's the first limitations on the sovereign, on the king's right to just hold somebody, And if he decides never to have their case go before a judge, then he can hold them forever. So that's the first limitation on that right to hold, So the limits on the right of the state to hold you without granting or releasing you. The only constitutionally right to release you have is through the private system. Everything else is just by statute and what the statute gives or the legislature gives they can take away. So I think we what we get attacked. But I'm kind of wondering if one of the reasons why we're being attacked is we're the only constitutionally protected type of release. You get rid of us, but they can start limiting release in general right For political enemies.

Yeah, exactly That's. I mean, that's the whole point. So it looks like you graduated law school and you really worked your way up. You've fought cases in the Fifth Circuit and focused a significant amount of your time in the appellate courts and de facto became the bondsman lawyer. Are you still representing bondsman?

Yes, now I'll say you know, i've always worked since I was 16. The only time, the only time I didn't work was when I was in law school because I had been a public school teacher for a couple of years. I had, you know, i didn't get into law school the first time I applied because I was always working. I graduated from undergrad in three years instead of four, and but we worked full time almost. I think I was 38 hours a week the first year and a half in college And so my grades were not what they needed to be to get into law school. So I got a master's degree and applied to law school again and got in, and so law school was the first time. I never worked and just concentrated on school and excelled in law school And then applied that coming out of law school.

And so I started working with an attorney who taught me really how to be a really good attorney. I look at him as probably one of the best attorneys in East Texas at the time And had always had an interest of appellate issues, and so whatever I was doing, i would do the appellate issues on those. And so we started out doing medical malpractice defense, representing doctors and hospitals, so I would do appeals on those issues. I argued my first case at the Supreme Court of Texas as a four year lawyer. I mean, my client met me in Austin when we met He's like you are not arguing my case, you are too young to be arguing my case at the Supreme Court of Texas And, and you know, i've always looked younger than I am And it's kind of catching up with me now.

But you know, I laughed and I said, well, you've got a problem because I'm the only one here that's prepared to argue your case tomorrow. And of course the argument went well because we were prepared. But then I had someone call me and they had a. They were a bondsman, they had 45 default judgments and they had asked somebody who do you hire for default judgments And they said we need appellate attorney. So and they recommended they call me. And so that's kind of what started me down the road of representing bondsman. And so I did some litigation with bondsman representing their interests And I've argued two of the most important cases in the bail industry at the Court of Criminal Appeals which we won. And then I am State Texas Counsel for several insurance companies And I represent bondsman across the state.

And you also sit as a board of director, or I don't know if I have the titles right, but you have some additional credentials as it pertains to bondsman, association and or bail. Can you walk me through those?

Sure, i'm on the board of directors of the professional bondsman of Texas, which we like to say is the voice of the bail industry in Texas, but I'm also on their legislative committee And we propose bills to the legislature. We are a resource to legislatures, to the state, about bail issues. We testify. I testify for and against what's good, what's bad about bills And I think we've kind of had to become experts on these issues when we probably never plan to be, as these bell reform movement began to take off Because no one seemed to be looking at the issues from the criminal justice perspective.

I mean the proposition 49, i believe from California, is the best example. It starts out if, hey, we're just going to change some felonies felony theft of $950 or less to a misdemeanor. These people need jobs, it just makes sense. And then they do it And all the right wing people you know TPPS, right on crime, supported that. The problem is. Then you got the urban air DAs decriminalizing theft under $950 and stores closing because they can't withstand $25,000 a day Absolutely In shoplifting. And so you know, it just seems like the right side of the argument is coming to the same conclusion as the left side, without looking at the potential consequences of doing this, and so we've really kind of jumped into the fray And from that perspective of let's make sure we're educating people on what the really downside could be, and so far we've had a really good track record of being correct.

One of the things that I would love for you to do, because I believe that there is a huge amount of cultural misinformation as it pertains to bondsmen. You see these reality shows, but what's the real history of bonding, actual bail?

Ooh, we know bail has been around for 200 years and there's one iteration of it where if you bonded somebody out of jail and they didn't show up, you had to take their place. We changed quickly after that little phase where we replaced it with a financial component instead of a one-for-one life. I think the misconception is we can't afford the federal system. The federal system is catcher and lease. They either detain them or they release them. But they detain over 70 or close to 75% of the people they arrest. Well, there's not a state in the state of Texas that can afford to detain 75% of the people that are arrested. We have to have some type of system in place. That's a compromise.

I talked to somebody who is describing the DC system for release, which is really the government takeover of the private sector and it's just so expensive. We've got a system where we've got the private industry that gets them out of jail and provides supervision and ensures that they'll show up for court, which is that all the purpose of bail is is we're going to get them out of jail and we promise that they'll show up to answer to their charges. The presumption of innocence doesn't apply there. It applies when they go to trial. That doesn't, because bail is. What assurance are you giving that you're going to show up for court?

Well, the bail reform movement is changing that and taking away the assurance. It's changing it to a promise. I don't have any problem with that for poor people. You got to have that as an option, but it's not the solution because it has such a higher failure to appear rate. All this is about failure to appear rates, when the best failure to appear rate, the lowest failure to appear rate, is the private sector. That means cases will get resolved quicker, victims will get adjusted quicker and your backlogs which is the huge thing we have now that we're addressing is backlogs. After COVID, your backlogs will decrease instead of increase.

Well, not to mention that your bail hearing can happen before your plea, correct? Yes, yes, they don't have to plea innocent or guilty in order to be released on bond.

That's right. The plea is not even a factor that you look at in setting bail. In Texas there's a list of I don't know right now because we just amended a couple of years ago probably seven factors in 17, 15 of the code of criminal procedure. What was the crime there? What's their criminal history? That's new. I think that's the most important thing. That we've added is a requirement that we review their criminal histories, because I think that tells you the most information about what they're going to be like, because someone goes through the spectrum of being a first-time offender to career criminal and you need to know where they are. We're going to treat first-time offenders one way, but if you're a career criminal or if you have a long criminal history which indicates you're a career criminal, you need to be treated a very different way.

Yeah, exactly As you say that. I think it's very important for the audience to understand that there's a big difference between criminal justice reform and bail reform. Bail and bondsmen have nothing to do with the application of the law, the charges, the sentencing and, for whatever reason, it seems that they've been vilified as if the same way the left treats police, as if they're the ones that are the shackles holding these people from being able to live free lives, free trial, and it's just not true.

Yeah, but the bail industry is the low-hanging fruit in the criminal justice reform discussion, because nobody trusts bondsmen. I talk to bondsmen all the time and I say, look, you work 20 years to get the great reputation you have. It takes one thing, one bad thing, or one thing that causes people to question you, to be all of a sudden you're the bad bondsman that we all thought you were. And so I had a bondsman give me a really nice compliment. They were like, oh, but no, Ken, you would be there and you would make sure they understood it. And I'm like, no, by then I would be the bad bondsman's bad bail attorney. And so I think that's part of the problem with the bail reform movement. And then the other thing I would add on, that is, I think the bail reform movement or the criminal justice reform movement is not really about reform. I think we're really coming to the conclusion that it's really about decriminalization.

And if the public was voting on that, they would say no, no, clearly, but that's not the choice they're being given.

It's all hidden within. It's a trifecta They want less charges and less sentencing, no bail and they hate cops. Yes, all three of those things. And what other people don't realize. and again, we have such a cop shortage in the country because how they've been vilified. Now, i'm under the opinion that bail bondsmen actually play a crucial role in easing the burden of law enforcement. who, let's say people, had ankle bracelets or some other form cops would then be responsible for those warrants to go out and search for people and do that. where there are practices in play with bondsmen, where there are check-ins and certain things that are actually like a civil arm of law enforcement, it's not law enforcement. Do you understand what I'm trying to say?

Absolutely, because this is the way I describe it. There's a conveyor belt that goes through the criminal justice system And by and large, every year, on average, the same number of cases are added to the conveyor belt as last year. And the problem is, if you can get the cases you need to get the same number of cases through the system that get added to the system, or your backlog is increased, and so the goal is to get more through, so the backlog decreases And the problem that we have with what's going on is anything that slows down that conveyor belt, because anytime you have a failure to appear, then that case has to be put on hold. So they come back, whether it's a day, an hour or months, because they get scared and they go hiding. So what I think the public does not realize is if they're on a personal bond or a no bond from New York, where they're released without bond, or in California, where they're released on a zero bail. That's just a simple release mechanism where nobody is overseeing them, nobody is supervising them, and so if they fail to appear, a warrant gets issued, it goes down to the warrant division and joins all the other thousands upon thousands of warrants waiting to be served, and that usually means they have to commit another crime to come back into the system. Sometimes it's a small crime, sometimes it's a huge crime, but if they're out on a surety bond, a bond by the private industry, then we have incentives to go find them.

Now we may have to hire somebody to do the arrest, because we can't do it ourselves. Depending on what state you are in in Texas, we can't do the arrest But we go look for them and we have a deadline to bring them back, or we're paying the full amount of the bond And so we're out there right away looking for them, trying to figure out if this was just a stupid failure to appear or a willful failure to appear I don't really care which one it is. They both cause the same amount of damage to the criminal justice system and then figure out a way. Are they going to be willing to come back And that's where our personal relationships with them come into play or do we need to go hire somebody that's going to do the recovery?

You mentioned Dog the Bounty Hunter. He's not a bondsman, he is a recovery agent, and so that would be somebody that possibly we would call to do a recovery on a very large bond. He's not going to go get somebody on a $1,500 bond. But our big job is just go find them and then usually we call the police and they come pick them up.

Yeah, it's interesting because as I look at that conveyor belt, which is a great metaphor, it just often seems like there's so many multiple steps And the more we muddy the waters and put everything together, the more confusing it gets. And so people think, well, bail is for people can afford it and this and that, And it's like well, do you understand that a bond is a very small percentage of the overall bail? and they're empowering people who can't afford it to be able to get out.

Well, the whole premise is misleading, because there was a professor in Florida that did a study on why are people languishing in jail, and his conclusion was not because of ability to pay. It was because of their criminal history. The longer their criminal history is, the more they would languish in jail before they were released on bail, because there's a correlation there. Also, what gets lost in the debate is the involvement of family. You know the secret sauce on why the bail system is so effective. The private industry is because of the involvement of family, and I mean you just can't discount that. That is so important For someone who is on the path to become a career criminal the ability of the family to turn them around and become productive citizens. I mean we're losing that in this debate because we're saying, oh, it's not fair, it's not right. I mean we have to treat everybody the same.

You know, at the beginning of this debate it was we have to change what we're doing because bail is going to be held unconstitutional.

Well then, bail was held constitutional And so then it was all about fairness, and so I agree we need to have it as an option to protect the poor, but it's not the solution, because the failure to appear rate is so much higher.

There's nothing that has the same failure to appear rate as the private industry And there's only two states that have anything that gets to the level of supervision that the private industry provides, And both of them New Jersey just did it in the last five years and they had to do a tax increase because it went around money And I think that's run out of money since then. The DC system I just did a podcast on somebody about the DC system and it's so expensive Even agreed that if they had it to do over again today they would never enact it because it was so expensive. So in all these bail reforms, what we're talking about is trying to get a cost savings and we're doing reforms that have no chance of working better and have 100% chance of being a lot worse because we can't afford or we're not willing to spend the money for the supervision to replace the private industry.

Exactly, it's the typical liberal left mob narrative, which is I just had this conversation about fossil fuels They want to destroy segments of our either our culture or industry or criminal justice system, without any replacement or decent numbers. I mean, we already see in Chicago, for example, is one of the first states that statewide issued I think it's called the SAFE-T Act, which includes cashless bail, and we're already seeing the numbers of offenses being repeated when people are out on cashless bail increasing significantly And they don't want you to know that, but it has a direct correlation with crime rates. Do you see that happening in other places?

Oh, absolutely. In fact there is, as a result of COVID, there's a DA in California, yolo County, who has no, no, no I guess. But there's a DA in Yolo County, california, that released two studies or two reports, the first one showing, hey, the increase in crime because of zero bail, so simple release without any accountability, has caused crime to increase. And then the criticism on him was hey, you didn't, there's no comparison with the private industry. So he went back and I think in February this year he released a second report doing that comparison And he found a 200% greater risk that a person released on zero bail would commit a violent offense, just because they were released on zero bail. And I mean that was an eye-opening number, a report, and it's been reported probably across the country.

Yeah, it's just pure insanity. And what are your figures and your opinions as far as when people say well, we can put them on house arrest. We have these ankle monitors, all these other, do they actually work?

I would say they work to a degree. But look, we're trying to automate stuff. I mean everything that we're talking about on bail reform. We're trying to automate it because we recognize that the government doesn't do a good system, so the government's never going to provide good supervision, so we're not even trying to, so we're going to do house arrest. But then we had counties where they don't have anybody even monitoring them on the weekend because they don't have anybody working then. So what if they just cut off their ankle monitor on Friday night? Do they have all weekend to play? Well, some counties, that's exactly what was happening. And so I think that you just no, they're not going to ever provide as good as supervision.

And the big problem with when you do that oh, we're going to do house arrest, we're going to do it with a GPS monitor is nobody's reminding them of their court dates. And we've got people advocating for a bail reform that says, well, we shouldn't be worried about the willful I mean the stupid failure to appear. We should only be concerned about the willful failure to appear, only about those people who are dead set about they're going to miss court. But the problem that what that misses is we already have overloaded courts. The stupid failure to appear where their case has to be put on hold for a couple months has ever been of the great damage to the system as the willful failure to appear where they have to go and get him and arrest him two months later. They both do the same damage to the criminal justice system.

Well, ken and you and I both know that a stupid failure to appear and a willful failure to appear is just a silly separation that doesn't even matter. I get like oh, you got a parking ticket, you get a speeding ticket, it goes in the mail. You don't check your mail, okay, you get a failure to appear. On that You go to the judge and they release the fines or whatever. That's one thing. But if you rob a store, if you have a gun conviction where it's not registered, if you have a significant amount of drugs, anything like that, and you don't appear, it's not because you're stupid, it's because you don't want to get sentenced.

Well, you know the the variance to you know has met with judges for the last several years and they argue that well, any reform to the criminal criminal justice system for pre-trial bail is going to carry with it a 40% failure to appear rate. Now compare that to the private industry, which has less than a 10% failure to appear rate. Wow, so you're seeing the criminal justice system by 300% And they're saying that should be okay. And I'm like you are just showing that you can't. You do not understand the criminal justice system, because a 300% delay of cases or increase of the failure to appear rate shuts down the criminal justice system.

Oh, it's a grinding halt.

A grinding halt, yeah, because they have so many cases being added to the conveyor belt that it pushes them to just dismiss cases, especially on the misdemeanor level. So you know, last August I looked at the report that's issued every month for the dispositions for that month for the misdemeanor court. Over 90% of them were dismissed.

Yeah, don't you think that's intentional?

Well, yeah, i think that is part of this push is to push for decriminalization, but I think there's other elements to it as well. I mean, you know, there's people making money hand over fist out of these reforms And that's part of the problem I have with these. You know, i think there's part of this coalition that is very good intent, intention or has a good intention of saying we want to help the poor, we want to protect first time offenders, but the problem is we're setting up systems that tie the hands of judges And then we've got organized crime, gang members, career criminals that are stepping into that void and just making money hand over fist. And I don't think people realize that when they're doing these things, because there's another part of the coalition that that's exactly what they want, Because this is new. I mean, this is cyclical. We've gone through this same period in the sixties. We're just repeating the mistakes that we made in the sixties.

Now, yeah, One of the things that you know. I'll tell a story. For example, i have a good friend and she got into some trouble in Yuma, arizona. She was got addicted to painkillers because she had back surgery And so I had to. You know, she asked me if I could bail her out. So I went down and I met with this bondsman, one of the most wonderful people. He's actually a huge fan of the show, so I hope he's listening But one of the most wonderful people I've ever met and I had this realization that you know, it's not a direct relationship and it could have been just because it's a smaller county, but generally the decent bondsman in an area that are, you know, working a certain courtroom, know the DA's, they know the judges and they can not officially offer advice, but they can really help their client or their bailee I don't exactly know how you refer to them, but they can really kind of help them navigate the system as well.

Well, i consider the bail industry, you know, a personal relationship industry. You know, just like a lot of what you do is personal relationships. What your you know your producer does is personal relationships. And what I do has a lot to do with personal relationships. And you know, and I know there's some people that would say Ken's a jerk, but there's a lot of people that say you know Ken's good, you can trust what he would say, he's not going to lie to you.

And I think that is so important in this, in this area, where the judge says, okay, this bondsman, we know they take care of business, we know they're going to provide supervision, we know that they're. If the defendant gets off track, starts doing drugs, that they're going to report that to the court. And you know they're sure there's going to be some bondsmen that they're they're not, they're thinking, are not taking care of business as well, just like we know attorneys that are not going to do as good a job as others. So we can always improve. But by and large, the private surety bail system is a personal relationship business. Everybody is trying. I mean, everybody knows your business, everybody knows you and you know them, and that's what allows the people to do a great job, to continue to do that.

What is this misnomer? You know, i read some of these articles and I have something sitting on my desk here, opinion piece why bail bondsmen are getting rich off of the justice system. When I had my encounter with this guy in Yuma, i mean he was a family man, super nice, you know I. you could just tell he's not making printing cash hand over fist. What is the average sort of income for these people? Is it a multi-multi-million dollar profiting situation for these guys? You know?

okay, first of all, that is a hit piece and it's targeted, you know, to the prejudice of people. It's trying to undermine people and undermine bondsmen. It goes right to where bondsmen are vulnerable is not being trustworthy. All the different things that, all the stereotypes that you can think of. That's where that is going, for I kind of agree with you, i think bondsmen are. You know, the reason why I think I've hit it off with the bail industry in Texas is because they're just like me, they are blue collar and they are hard workers. And you know, i've I know people who've been in the industry for two generations. I know people have been in there for three generations And you know, when I started out as an attorney representing bondsmen, that wasn't true.

When you died, your bail bond business died with you because nobody else knew how to run it Right. And so what I mean are bondsmen getting rich off of it. I mean, they're a business just like any other business. They can be a mom and pop business or they can operate in multiple counties and they can be, more like, you know, a successful business. But I mean I would say the vast majority of bondsmen in Texas are mom and pop shops And you're you know, just like your mom and pop shops across the United States. I don't think anybody's getting rich quick in these days.

Yeah, i mean, it's similar to fast food And when I look at, like, you know, people vilify oh Chick-fil-A makes all this money. Well, you've got Chick-fil-A, the corporate, and then you've got the franchisees right, and the franchisees aren't raking hand over fist. They might make you know, a couple million a year or whatever it is, but it's this whole notion that people are profiting off of inequities or off of, you know, food and these you know things that are must haves And like to your point. When I met this gentleman in Yuma it was, you know, it was very eye-opening to me that this is just a regular guy who runs a regular business, no different than a small town attorney that has, you know, maybe one paralegal, or a small town doctor with a couple of nurses. I mean, it's, you know, it's a professional business, but it's not a you know billion dollar play, but you know what argument I would make to the people that are making that argument.

You know, because you know to the the reason. with people you'd say exactly what you said, but to those people that are throwing out the stereotypes, you know the argument that I would make to them is look, bail's been around for 200 years. This isn't the first time we've tried to get rid of it. I mean it's in the second, it's not even the third. I mean we've had pushes to get rid of bail over the years. We have them periodically.

The problem is there is no replacement that does a comparable job. Even today, every replacement does a substantially worse job, and substantially worse means you need more courts, and if you need double the courts to do exactly what you're doing with the private sector, then it's not an option, and so we are a necessary evil in the even in. it should be in the minds of the people that don't like the bail industry until we get to the point where we can have something that is comparable. And the problem is we're never going to get to that point because nobody knows what we do and how we do it and they don't care to learn. They just want to talk in stereotypes.

And I don't know how much you know about me I had a pretty successful marketing agency before I sold it and started my podcast. So, from a marketing perspective, what kind of press efforts do you guys do to kind of reshape and remold people's impression of the industry and these people?

Oh, you know we've gone through a debate on that for a long time And you know, at one point in time I was adamantly opposed to it, and so you can see I've gone a long way, from adamantly opposed to anything to here I am talking to you about it, and what? because my position has always been nobody's going to know about like we do. We can't hire PR people that are going to be able to explain our issues because they don't understand it. And so we've kind of done a hybrid. We've become experts on the issue and we kind of develop ourselves as resources And so we sell ourselves as we want to tell you what the different possibilities are.

If you do this, or if you're talking about switching over to the New Jersey plan, let us tell you what the New Jersey plan is. Or if you want to talk about what's going on in California, we will provide you with the resources. You want to talk about risk assessments? Here we'll tell you about multiple states that have had good or bad and mostly bad, if not all bad experiences with risk assessments, and we'll provide you with the documents. So we have kind of we have a PR committee and I'm the chair of it and we provide resources to people.

Well, part of this Marxist revolution and part of the left's, you know, attack on the criminal justice system is really about trying to vilify people who can make money through, through whatever it is, even because they're so anti-capitalist. My question there is is that because majority of people never go to jail, never have to flee a case and don't have these issues they might know someone who does, but they don't have these issues They immediately take on the impression of what they see in the media, and what they've seen in the media is that these bail bondsmen because they have to see in order to implement cashless bail, they have to vilify something else and make it look worse right And then to the public. So there has been a huge effort on the left's behalf to discredit and remove or even shut down the bond industry because they've claimed that it's this big profit machine.

Their system or their reforms do not get rid of the private shirty bail industry. But immediately after it was enacted the Attorney General issued an opinion that said you have to try everything else before you can try a shirty bond. And so the whole state of New Jersey. For the first 60, 90 days there was only three shirty bonds granted in the whole state.

Oh, wow.

And in fact they put the private shirty bail industry out of business there. And so I think that is I mean, I've already said that this is kind of a coalition of groups, but there is a very left part of that coalition that that's what they want. They want to create chaos, because if there's so much chaos that you can't resolve criminal cases, then that puts pressure on dismissal And so that pushed pressure on decriminalization And then that undermines the trust in the public, because if you're going to be punished in one county, then the next county over they're not even going to prosecute that crime. Well, then we undermine the faith in the criminal justice system.

Yeah, i mean, i think the regional issue is a big issue going from the county, the regional issue going from county to county, and judges have assigned themselves political stance, so some judges will release, some judges were stricter on bail, and because there's no consistency and I don't think there should be federal consistency, but I think state consistency, with just a few check boxes as to who qualifies, who doesn't to remove the personal opinions or politics that are within these DAs and within the judges, i think that would help a lot because it isn't fair for someone who is in Dallas versus in Austin and with the same exact drug offense, and the guy in Dallas is rotting in a cell and the guy in Austin is out free, just because of the judge and the DA have decided to apply the law unequally.

Well, i'm going to tell you I disagree with that, and I'm going to tell you why. Because I think the criminal justice system is that one place where everything is individual, and so you're so, so me and Dallas is completely different than me and Harris County, and so I think the judges need to have the ability to apply their discretion. But I do agree with you that politics has taken the place of discretion, and it's just now. You know, you're bad, you're, this is what party you're with, and so this has to be your position on release. And you know, and it's based on the assumption that, well, we're going to release more criminals and we're going to be safer, and that, you know, you know we always heard, if it sounds too good to be true, it's too good to be true. Well, it is too good to be true to say we can release a third of the criminals that we are holding in jail and say we're going to be safer. That it's not only not too good to be true, it's a lie.

Yeah, a lot of people forget. You know, in Clinton's first term in the early 90s, the drug violence and the killing and the drug and the gangs were so crazy And they enacted the strictest gang violence and drug reform ever out of Congress And six months later it just plummeted. The rates just plummeted. Oh yeah, and my point here is that there is a very clear connection between the law and the application of punishment.

And you know what needs to be quick, and that's one of the things that this chaos is doing is slowing it down. And what is that? That has an impact on the victims. They have less and less incentive. And then you have this defund the police movement, which means we can't trust the police. So you don't report crimes to the police. So you know you have left wing groups saying, oh, crimes down. No, crime is not down. Crime is up and it's up substantially, but you're beating it into everybody that you can't report it.

Right. So what do you say to these people who say, oh there was. I just read a case recently about a. Might've been a while ago, but a woman hung herself in her cell because she couldn't afford bail and she was there on a traffic stop or something. It's like. These are the cases that are focused on, but I would have to say that there are not a huge population of people sitting in jail who are first offenders on misdemeanor or even below, you know, misdemeanor or infractions that are just sitting there being held. I mean right, Or is it massive?

No, i mean, I'm gonna tell you there are no first time offenders in jail anymore that are just sitting there because they can't afford bail. I've never believed that to be true And you know what? What's proven me correct on that is the charitable bail funds, because they raised all this money as a result of the Floyd incident. You know, when they started bailing people out of jail, they found that there's nobody in jail on first time offenders. So they've been getting kind of cross ways with people for bailing out very dangerous people, because that's the ones that are left.

I mean, they're actually bailing out people with no family involvement, and those are the career criminals that need to stay in jail.

Absolutely, and just kind of making the very strange argument that affluent white people are, you know, committing tax law and they're not going to jail. I mean, first thing I wanna just say about that is we don't have debtors jail in the United States. It is very, very difficult to get prosecuted criminally for tax issues, unless you blatantly lie and steal other people's refunds or, you know, just do absolutely criminal things. It's very, very hard. I would think the same applies than a brown or a black person who has a drug crime.

Yeah, i mean, look, let me come at this a different way. I think one of the problems that we have is we have an urban crime problem. I mean, that's where we have high population numbers, the courts are more overburdened And what we have is people trying to make this all about race, and what we have is we have stacking of problems in our big cities. We have, you know, failing families, failing school. The dropout rates are high there.

We have drug issues, just enormous drug issues in our urban cities. And you know, look at Portland, where they're decriminalized all heavy crimes. So it's like they're just put a green light on overdoses, just you know, and they have a record number every month almost of the number of people overdosing. So it's like, i mean, they decriminalize crime to clear out the drug problems by slowly letting everybody just overdose. And then you've got no economic opportunity And, especially after George Floyd is, we've just burned down our tax base and with the politicians saying it's okay And then just shocked that they're not coming back.

And so when we're making this distinction between white collar crime and, you know, blue collar crime or we've got, you know, minorities and that have a higher proportion, we have an urban crime problem that we are just turning our back on. Or we're saying the criminal justice system needs to now do what we have failed to do to protect families, to keep them together, to protect schools, to keep people in schools, to keep people off of drugs and give people economic opportunity where we failed in every one of those things. And now we're gonna say, oh, but we're gonna be successful in the criminal justice system, so we're gonna get rid of everything that works and replace it without you. In other words, it's not a criminal justice issue.

It's a cultural issue.

Oh, I think that's a good way to say it.

Yes, You know it is.

It is a cultural issue, And you know we can't blame the criminal justice system on cultural issues.

I tell everyone all the time look, our criminal justice system isn't perfect, but it's the best we have and it's the best in the world.

I say that too. We may not think we may get mad at it. Sometimes it's the best in the world, Do you?

have stats or just in your industry experience that you know. I think we kind of lean to know that the crime rates are going up. But how bad does it get after a significant period of time where bond has been basically eliminated?

Well, chicago and Illinois is a very interesting place right now because you know we talk about cash bail, cashless bail we talk about, but what gets lost in the debate or the discussion is Illinois got rid of the private shirty bail system a long time ago. So when they're talking about cash bail, they're talking about cash bonds, and you know the states that rely heavily on cash bonds. They're funding a portion of their court system with that money when they fail to appear And so they're relying. So when they get rid of cash bail in Illinois or Chicago, what they're talking about is they're getting rid of the cash bonds, which is all they have left, which is going to then create even more chaos because it will have I mean, it will cause a higher failure to appear rate. I mean cash bonds have a higher failure to appear rate over the private industry, so they're already dealing with a higher failure to appear rate.

To start with. That they've just decided oh, that's acceptable to us And it's been acceptable for years, and so now we're talking about cutting their funding because they've been relying upon the failure to appear money from the cash bonds to fund the courts, and so there is no way that doesn't create just absolute chaos because they have less money for the courts and they have higher failure to appear rates. And that I mean, and for them to be arguing the opposite, is just what we see across the country. And you're going to see, i think, this Supreme Court of Illinois step in and say their statute, that they passed to get rid of cash bail, is unconstitutional, but it doesn't fix their problem. They're still going to have the same problems they had before, because they've already gotten rid of the private surety system And so they've already gotten rid of the best system with the lowest failure to appear rate.

You just mentioned something in the industry that I had no idea. You talk about how the private assurity system that was eliminated in Illinois and the cash bonds that are going into the court and being used for failure to appear Is that a reason for a push for the? Is it a significant amount of money that's helping support parking tickets and stuff like that? that's helping support the government function?

It can be. I mean, there are some states that authorize you to pay 10% to the bondsman or 10% to the court, and that money then gets used to fund the courts and so they become reliant upon it. But the problem is that's kind of the worst of both worlds when you pay 10% to the court because nobody's providing you notice, nobody's providing supervision, and so you've got, you're paying the fee that would have gone to a private surety bondsman, but you have none of the benefits of the private surety bail system. So you've got a worse system. and then you're making it a system that the court Courts absolutely rely upon the money, and so it becomes a place where they're just going off the edge of the cliff slowly. It's like slow motion. destruction of the criminal justice system.

Yeah, that makes so much sense When it comes to. There's another story that I recently read about a certain percentage of bail bondsmen take liens out on the equity of families, homes and property. Is that something that you see all the time and is that effective? or people losing their houses?

Well, i live in Texas and Texas has homesteads under the Texas Constitution. So if a bondsman was to take a deed of trust or a lien against a homestead, it would be improper, it would be the equivalent of nothing. So do I see that? No, i don't see it in Texas at all. I've been doing this over 30 years and I've never seen anyone even try to foreclose on a home that is someone's homestead.

Now, taking a deed of trust on real estate would be on a large bond. A $500,000 bond would be a smart business decision and also it would give an incentive for the person whose property. That is to help you to encourage the defendant. That's kind of the family involvement to encourage the defendant to turn around and do right. And so I think that there is a practice of taking collateral on large risks, and that is part of the secret sauce of why the bail industry is so successful. And I think that's one of the reasons why we get attacked is family should not be held accountable for standing up for defendants who are family members and then they sign contracts And you can't have it both ways. I mean that's just kind of the whole. We can't hold anybody accountable for anything anymore in our criminal justice system.

That's interesting. Are you seeing any like true backlash against people in your industry? where are there legal challenges and battles? you guys are in right now to help preserve the system that you have.

Well, i would probably say we're under attack everywhere we go. You know, at the Texas Legislative Session that just ended, there was a bill proposed that would require a personal bond for all misdemeanors. They amended it to kind of make it sound like oh, except for violent misdemeanors, but that was. You know, there was just a camouflage on that. And so we're under attack there, even though the yellow study says that's the worst thing you could do, and that's just from February. You've got the Harris County DA issuing a report saying that's a terrible thing to do And we still are facing that.

Then you've got court cases which I think you're coming to the end of the court cases, or in the Texas you are, because we have the O'Donnell case from four or five years ago And then that was expanded to the Dallas court case called Davis versus Dallas County.

That went up to the Fifth Circuit multiple times And they've kind of just blown a hole in the plaintiff's arguments and really just said, as of March, that these cases should not be filed in federal court. There's going to be a petition for cert on it, filed at the end of July. I probably expect it to be denied, but that would be a case to watch. I just see you, so I see us under attack everywhere, but I see that come into an end because the changes that we've seen we now have the benefit of time and they're disastrous and not sustainable, and so if what we're doing is not sustainable, then you're going to go back to what works, and what works is the private shirty bail system. The reason why we work is because no one else can do what we do or what it does, and until we find something that does, you're always going to come back to it.

Yeah, and I don't think there is anything that does it.

There's a reason why it's worked. There's things that stay and they do well And, like the Constitution, it's timeless. It's there. There are certain aspects of our criminal justice system that are there. They're the fundamentals, and we're also in a capitalist system that's under attack. But part of having cash bond or property bond or using the insurance or whatever, people in this country are motivated by money. If they're going to lose a significant amount of money, they're going to make sure that they're checking all the boxes, whereas if there's no motivation, there's no accountability, then there's no incentive for them to stop committing crime.

I would argue that we're already under a civil war in our society because we have one group that's being encouraged to. If you don't like something, then you need to. The nice way to say it is protest. Probably another way of saying it is burn down businesses and without consequences, and we've seen that. And then on the other side of the spectrum, if they do anything even close, then you have to be prosecuted, and you have to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and we've seen that in our history. I mean, this is a really bad, probably, analogy, but we've seen a history where a country had brown shirts that just attacked people when they didn't agree with them, and that's kind of.

I would argue that we have a little bit of that going on. Where you can see it at the Supreme Court, we don't agree with the results you're coming to, so we're going to attack you personally and we're going to attack the court as a whole until you get in line. It doesn't have anything to do with whether what you're doing is right or wrong. It has everything to do with we disagree with your opinion And until you turn around, we're going to keep attacking you, and that I mean. What else is that other than a civil war without guns?

until we you know, until we go back into a time where we have the ACLU defending someone's free speech, no matter what speech it was, you had the right to make the speech. We don't have that anymore. Everything is based upon what speech you're going to make, and if you are making the speech that we don't agree with, then we can. we agree that people should do anything they want to you until you quiet down. We can't, we are. that is not sustainable as a society And we have to get through this period so that we can get to to recover from it, and we will. it's just going to take a while.

Yeah, I mean. My buddy, Mark Levin, calls it American Marxism, And that's exactly what it is. And poor justice? Thomas, you're right, We are. And then we're on the brink of a civil war. And I just said on my show a couple of days ago you know if, if, if they go through with this indictment of Trump and they assign him time to spend time in jail there, a civil war will break out in this country.

If the Democrats lose, or the far left of the party, they will not consent to be governed and they will do everything in anything they can to pressure their allies to do what they've done to Trump.

Yeah, yeah it's, it's frightening, so hopefully Trump has a good bondsman.

Hopefully he won't need one. But the criminal justice system, as you said, the reforms defund the police. All these other things are just pushes for chaos And you know where it impacts the bail system is cases that used to take six months to a year to resolve are now taking two years, three years with COVID, four years. So we've got people on bail for four years And you know I mean a lot of these people are nomads. You know they're problem children to begin with. They haven't found their niche Right And you know keeping up with them for four years. If it wasn't for the bail industry, the state would have no way of keeping up with them at all.

Yeah, i agree. And are you guys? do you do a lot of lobbying?

Well, we do have a lobby team, which is, you know, our legislative committee. So we do in Texas. You know one of the people that you know, senator Whitmire in the Texas legislature, who's the oldest sitting senator in the Texas Senate, has said that we have a very powerful lobby in Texas, and you know whether that is a true statement or not, i mean, but I always tell our team we want to highlight that because we want people to think we have a very powerful lobby or whether he's just putting a big target on our back to just say it was us that killed his bill. But yeah, i would say that we have a good team and we do a lot of education on issues, and I think that's our job is to educate people on issues.

Before I let you go, put everything in a nutshell for us. If my audience had to take away one thing from this interview, what do you think the most important thing is within bail reform and how it's impacting the private bond industry?

On the bail reform debate we have a division. Parts of the country are still pushing for it. Other parts have tried it and have realized that it was a failure and have been rolling it back. New York has now rolled it back three times, and we also have the benefit of science or time, and we were coming out with reports showing how all the things the bail industry has said are true When you release more criminals, you will get more crime, not less crime, and so you need the private surety bail system to get people to court, to get cases resolved, to get victims their resolution. The private surety bail system has been around for 200 years. They've been around because they do one thing. They do it really good They get people to court with the lowest failure to appear rate. Anything else else has.

A substantial failure to appear rate creates chaos, creates pressure to dismiss criminal cases, which just creates a void for organized crime, gang members and career criminals to step into and make millions, maybe even billions of dollars, and that's what you see in the bail reform movement. I mean, i would argue. The last thing I would say is there are parts of this country where the bail reform changes have been so drastic and so awful that you can't look at them and say what would they have done differently, the elected officials, if they were in the pockets of organized crime? that's where we are The changes that are being made and are now being rolled back because they're not sustainable. And they will be rolled back one way or the other because what we have in place right now, or what's being pushed, cannot work, will not work and will create chaos. So we do So. There is hope. We just have to get through this period of time.

You have your own podcast and your social channels. How can my audience find you read more of your stuff? listen?

more to you. Thank you so much for mentioning that, but the professional bottom of the text is it has a website that you can go to, the pbtxcom. They have a blog where we post things on their important news in the bail industry across the country periodically And then we have our own podcast. Or I have my own podcast called the Bell Post and you can find it by going to thebellpostcom, where we try to educate a legislator public on the different issues in bail reform. If you want to know what the New Jersey plan is, we have a podcast on the issue. Through our podcast is to educate people on the issues and to be a resource to legislatures.

Last question Do you guys, do you take donations for the legal fees to fight these laws? We really don't?

I mean? I mean we have a, we have a bail pack which I guess people could contribute to, but we, you know, we are a self-funded industry and our pbt is funded through our state group of membership. And then we have support of our insurance companies And but you know, we would love to have people join us in, just saying they stand with us on these issues.

All right, Well, hey, this was great. Thank you so much. I have a personal passion for criminal justice reform and how it is playing into this bigger picture. You know, again, it's like everything under the guise of equity, you know, bail is inequitable for people who are poor and people of color. It's all just an excuse to create, like you said, the chaos that people are profiting on and getting elected on.

Well, thank you for having me. I'd like to talk about our issues, but it's so much fun to have a discussion with somebody who is fully briefed on our issues And you know it's been a great conversation from from from my part.

Well, on that note, folks, i'll let you enjoy your weekend. This is Chad Law, reminding you of what Reagan once said for us, but verify, and there are no better words today, especially as it pertains to the new God. bless you, president Reagan, and make God save America.

You just listened to the last gay conservative podcast hosted by Chad Law.