How Did Sam Bankman-Fried Get Bail?
serioustrouble.show
serioustrouble.show
Part of it is that the bail bond industry can afford lobbyists, and probably a bigger part is that "tough on crime" grandstanding by politicians is nearly always a winning strategy. It is too easy to claim a politician that advances any kind of reform will be pilloried as someone who is trying to put savage criminals back on the street, your street.
In my country, technically there's a bail bond of $500 due to an archaic law, advanced to you by the Police, and you have to pay them it if you breach bail conditions.
In reality, if you breach bail, your arrest will become high priority, and you're very likely going into the remand wing once arrested until you can appear in front of a judge, and then you'll also be facing a charge for breaching bail, in addition to the charges you already faced.
And breaching bail is an offense that nearly guarantees that the judge will remand you into custody until your trial date, which could be 3 - 6 months away.
So there's no need for monetary bonds, because the existing consequences are severe enough.
No, the problem is not conditional release (bail), or even the financial penalty (bail amount) that is assigned in advance in the even the conditions are broken.
The particular conditions may be problematic, especially when they (say) require, in practice, either a deposit or other security in the full value of the potential penalty or a contract with a licensed bail agent (which some states, and the federal system, generally do not.) But…
> Bail bondsman are a life saver to a person who can’t afford their bail and have to work in the morning. Obviously being rough comes with the job, but most bondsman aren’t villains they provide a service during a time of bad policy.
…except that bail bondsmen are a major force lobbying state governments for the policies which create the need. They are working very hard to set up, and preserve, the conditions that make them seem like lifesavers.
Most Western’s police forces are completely dysfunctional. France isn’t able to deport a non-French imam performing hate speech on French soil and living at the same address for months[1]. Police and prison forces are often caught performing lip service against both terrorism or white collar crime, practically all the cases of terrorism now include an attacker who has been liberated 2 to 50 times after murder attempts[2], and police/prison forces seem to be using law to excuse liberating obviously-dangerous people rather than using law to keep them in. So, the theory that if you break bail, you become arrestable, needs to meet actual practices in that country. Let’s hope the US govt sees enough political interest in finishing SBF to actually ensure he doesn’t flee.
[1] https://newsrnd.com/news/2022-12-08-moroccan-imam-iquioussen...
[2] For example William M in yesterday’s Paris attack (Article in French) https://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/plusieurs-blesses-apres-d...
But I might be wrong about that.
But, given the fragmented nature of policing in the US, I can see how what works here might not work there.
You can pay your bail yourself. Say a judge gives you a $5k bail. You give the government 5k and they hold it until your case is complete. Then they either return it or they deduct your fines etc from it and return anything left.
Most people don’t do this. They go to a bail bond company, which charges them $500 and then puts up the 5k for them. They get the 5k back when the defendant shows up and keep the $500.
People do skip out on bail pretty regularly, so there’s no guarantee the bondsman gets his money back. But he’s invested in finding the skipper at least as much as the government. At least in theory. The US generally doesn’t go after people very hard for skipping out on bail, they just wait until you get detained for some other crime and then arrest you for having a warrant out. Well, sometimes they still let you go after that.
I think these people would prefer everyone sit on rocks rather than poor people sit in wooden chairs while rich people had leather couches.
One day, hopefully not too many days away, our descendants will wake up and discover that the last poor person has been lifted from poverty.
To get there from here, we have to take it one day at a time, and focus on changing what we can.
Is that actually true? I’m very curious if there’s any theoretical evidence that a society where everyone is at minimum “middle class” can exist.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
A tech like AC is not available to everyone all at once. It starts out very expensive and gets cheaper over time. It may end up cheap enough that it can be ubiquitous, but before that point there must be a time that only most people can afford it.
If you then include it in the must-have category before the point of ubiquitousness, you will never get rid of poverty. Whereas if you include it after the point it's a pointless exercise, because everyone that wants one already has it.
The fact that we're not providing the above basics universally to all citizens right now, as a matter of priority above all else, is a damning critique of government and one of the main reasons that set me down the path of anarcho-capitalist thought.
Consider a couple of other stats from that site:
> the proportion of population with access to electricity in 2020 was 100%.
and a 2.5% unemployment rate.
For concreteness, I'll say that I would define "poor" as not having the capability to satisfy the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs ) By that standard Bhutan isn't poor despite being technically a Third World nation.
Poor just means they have less than most other people.
To illustrate this point, in our current era of the mega rich, we also have record low levels of poverty.
Wealth isn't a zero sum game. It's possible (but not always the case) for a billionaire to create more than a billion dollars of wealth for other people.
If it’s enough calories and roof other your head… Then we have very few true poor. Especially if we don’t include those who are there due to choice and/or mental illness.
I mean if we are only using the most convenient definition it's easy to say we have few poor people. If you are eating only rice everyday in your rusting trailer somewhere in the Midwest, you're poor.
And yeah, when that happens, your mental health is not going to be great.
Mental health as in mental health issues making people make decisions where they end up on the streets. Many homeless people were living normal lives when their mental health deteriorated.
> It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people.
At the end of the day, the goal is to create enough incentive for someone to stay and face justice. Anything that furthers that goal without marginalizing people is a good start.
The best we get is this "effective altruism" bullshit, which is just regular billionaire puppetry with a shiny new coat.
No, things (e.g. transactions in the economy, contracts that get signed, tax & transfer payments, etc) are almost never zero-sum. They are usually positive-sum, and sometimes very negative-sum. Almost never zero-sum.
They appear to be zero-sum if you only focus on the raw dollars that change hands in a transaction. But they're not zero-sum in the utility that's created, which is what matters for any meaningful analysis.
If you ‘give’ an addict rehab they may fight you every step of the way, but if you give them heroin they’ll love you.
That said, there are other ways to help those with addiction beyond giving them heroin.
Yes, if the person you're helping has a calibrated moral compass and is mentally sound.
We need both.
This is GP's point, AFAICT.
They're not hoarding grain or iron or silicon or network bandwidth - in fact the only reason they got rich in the first place is because they allocated these physical resources effectively to serve a wide group of people. (See AWS for example. The average computer runs at maybe 10% utilisation for 2 hours a day; whereas theirs are at a high utilisation 24/7.)
As you rightly said, the things that Bezos, Musk and Gates are "hoarding" is capital in the literal sense.
Their net worth isn't made of gold coins sitting in a swimming pool doing nothing, but car factories, server farms and massive logistics networks.
I want to point out that first of all, this isnt even a good comparison, because nobody is talking about just giving people a massive lump sum of cash. Its about putting the money back into the workers creating it, as well as public welfare systems to ensure future safety nets.
And second of all, even if we just gave the money away and people "pissed it away", the money is still being circulated and put back into the economy.
Of course it is easy to say 'put money back into workers creating it'. But the labor market is just that - a market, and no-one is being forced to give away their labor for free or less than it's worth.
If the tax code is riddled with tens of thousands of exceptions that incentivise a gazillion different behaviours, again, that's the will of the people asserting itself via the tax code. It's much harder to unpick those, right? Thus the highly enlightened conversation about making billionaries illegal and such.
> And second of all, even if we just gave the money away and people "pissed it away", the money is still being circulated and put back into the economy.
Yeah, that worked out great and totally did not result in historically high inflation that will now cause a recession with massive job losses (thus hurting the cause of the workers it purports to support). Also, the inflation is totally not a tax that will be paid mostly by poor people or those on fixed incomes.
So the average American wouldn't need to take in a homeless person. The homeless people could fit in ~3% of the vacant homes.
Obviously it's more complicated than that but sometimes capitalism does suck.
[1] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/the-size-and-census...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/realestate/vacancy-rate-b...
But for me, your example is capitalism in the sense that people do it of their own free will. They give up their time and resources to help others without coercion or compulsion. Capitalism is freedom to me, and a natural state that exists outside of the state where people can interact freely with one another. What they do with it is another question entirely.
Others, however, equate capitalism with greed and evil though.
It's hard to run a soup kitchen with no food or volunteers.
44 billion dollars could take most if not all homeless people in this country and see them in apartments for a year.
A couple billion would feed every hungry child in the country.
3% of railroad company profits would give their workers 14 sick days instead of 0.
Theres an infinite amount of good that billionaires could do without even noticing the cost, but they choose not to.
Resource hoarding.
It's very easy to demand accountability of billionaires and supremely difficult to collectively hold our political leaders responsible. The law doesn't require billionaires to be accountable to the general public beyond obeying laws and paying taxes that are due, but our public representatives have higher standards to live up to, and our focus should be on them, not billionaires. All the wealth of American billionaires would add up to a couple years' federal budgets (or perhaps less than a year of federal and the top 4 populous states' budgets).
EDIT: The City of Los Angeles apparently spends ridiculous amounts of money on a per-person basis to 'solve' the homelessness problem (https://ktla.com/news/los-angeles-is-spending-up-to-837000-t...). This is just one example of ridiculous rent-seeking government bureaucracy and nonprofit hucksters. Money is not the problem, lack of accountability is.
- The recipients get a greater share of existing resources.
- The changed demand changes supply accordingly. So there might be fewer private jets produced but more food produced, for instance. Thus future production changes too, and the economy is reshaped.
Why do you imagine these things wouldn’t happen?
Also, somehow you seem to be under an impression that the US does not implement the welfare state paradigm. Did you ever look at the budget and see how much is spent on mandatory and discretionary welfare programs? The fact that it did not fix poverty should give you an idea that maybe it's not Elon Musk being too greedy that is the problem here.
The US has some good welfare state elements, but overall it’s very bad and far inferior to places that do it well. The consequence is vastly higher poverty rates.
Redistribution increases demand in the short term, but in the longer term production shifts accordingly to match. Which really is the whole point: Changing the economy to produce more of what ordinary people need.
Isn't the long-run aggregate supply curve basically completely price inelastic?
Ironically, SBF's mom wrote about that and even made a claim that if se has any sense self awareness would make her question her entire career given how her son and his colleagues turned out [0]:
> The reality is that we are all at best compromised agents, whether by biology, social circumstance, or brute luck. The differences among us are differences of degree that do not admit of categorical division into the normal and the abnormal. A morally serious inquiry into the requisite meaning of free will needs to face some basic facts about this society—for starters, that in the United States parental income and education are the most powerful predictors of whether a three-year-old will end up in the boardroom or in prison; that most abusive parents were themselves victims of abuse and neglect; that the norms of one’s peer group when growing up are powerful determinants of behavior; and that traits of emotional reactivity and impulsiveness, which have a large genetic component, are among the more robust predictors of criminal behavior. Such an inquiry would also need to address what evidence would suffice to conclude that Smith could have behaved differently. Is it enough that someone in a similar situation once pulled herself up by her own bootstraps? That the average person does? And how can we be sure that the situations are in fact similar in relevant ways?
0: https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blam...
Furthermore, it was the Sacklar family who used it's wealth to protect its self from personal liability, despite it being a family operation, and avoided some much needed Civil lawsuits in order to put harsher Corporate Laws in place and instead let Perdue pharma take the bulk of the fines [0] and they only had to kick some in an offer a contrite apology for all the death and misery they profit(ed) from.
I'm as anti-CCP as they come and I'm very vocal about it, and I see them as an illegitimate group of thugs and cronies who should be overthrown; but to think that US Pharma, with the help of paying politicians for favourable laws isn't to blame for the opioid crisis is outright delusional.
Moreover, its been suggested by those with ties with the major Mexican drug cartels who supply the US--and have added precautions to help ID contamination--that the rise in fentaynol is coming from domestic sources as poverty has risen dramatically since COVID and made things worse for so many, and thus US based drug dealers (be it of American, Chinese or Russian lineage) have been cutting their drugs with them in order to either stretch them as demand has exceeded supply due to the wide reach [1] on social media as a lucrative but short-lived cash grab, or in order to attract more serious addicts who built tolerances is a more likely scenario than the CCP trying it's hand at re-creating the addiction tactics used in the Sino-Anglo war--they're too busy destroying it's economy and rattle-sobering in the Taiwan straight.
This says it all:
> “Drug dealers are using American innovation to sell lethal products,” executive director Paul DelPonte wrote. “Social media platforms bear some responsibility for these deaths.”
Honestly, it's as if the core story of Breaking Bad, which was a dramatized critique of social divides within the US medical system, law enforcement and hyper crony Capitalist system, has been entirely forgotten despite it being a land mark series of the 2010's that exposed some of the obvious hypocrisy of the US Society.
The truth is if the US had any real interest in solving any of this, they'd likely offer free testing of drugs for users without punishment but since it mainly affects poorer people they really have no interest in doing so since the war on drugs, and homelessness is such a cash cow to funnel public funds into NGOs and non-profits; ironically the very website/DNM the FBI took down (Silkroad) had a reputation system to solve this in addition to a licensed Chemist (Dr.X) who DPR paid [2] to keep it's members safe and who is now serving multiple life sentences in a Super Max prison for doing something innovative to reduce unnecessary deaths and violence in drug deals and a pubic health service!
Ross was many things, naive most above everything else, but this goes to show that it isn't a lack of talent in the US to try and address the immense drug issue it has (and continues to get worse) but rather self-interest, regulatory capture and the Industrial Prison Complex an an entrenched legal system to blame.
0: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/03/purdue-pharma-us-states-agre...
1:https://www.seattletimes.com/business/group-urges-feds-to-in...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20210413041647/https://www.daily...
And more on bail reform: https://youtu.be/xQLqIWbc9VM
We could argue most people would make a run for it; I’d argue that a trial should be held more quickly. No prison time for more than it takes to schedule a case with a judge. Arrest the person, have a trial starting within a week or so (or don’t arrest).
Part of what happens today is, they set a high bail. Lock people up for months to years without a trial, then people agree to a plea deal before the trial starts. It’s a way around due process. Imo a direct violation of the 8th amendment.
Bail used to make a tad more sense when there wasn’t an organized police force but random citizens arresting you. You could post bail to farm for the season, or what have you. Then they’d have the trial when the judge held court again (after he farmed his fields).
Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes and the like are all scumbags, but if you give me the choice between living next to them, or someone arrested for almost any other crime, I'm picking the fraudster that depended on their now ruined public image to defraud people.
I think the main thing is that we haven't seen what he might do now that he knows for sure that he's (by default) headed for a lifetime in jail.
It seems that before the arrest, he was pretty delusional / "high on his own supply" and believed he was going to somehow talk his way out of trouble, as he'd ostensibly been doing for so long.
So the thought experiment now is: do we believe that there's anything nefarious that he could do now, that he'd stopped himself from doing back when he was still trying to maintain an illusion?
For example, he could have various wallet private keys (secretly?) memorized [1], and could take steps to move the funds to new wallets.
TBH the idea that his (fiat) transactions are limited to $1k is a little laughable for someone who until recently, and perhaps still, has access to billions in crypto.
Of course, that's what he wants me to think. I'm ready to learn that my take is too naive. But so far, evidence of a bigger plot is missing for me.
Morally, I think people like Madoff are worse than many gang members or low-level violent criminals. That doesn't change the fact that they are far less of an immediate threat to the people around them, particularly now that they have been exposed. A confidence scam fraudster who has been exposed is a bit like a paraplegic murderer. They may be morally reprehensible, but they're effectively unlikely to reoffend in a few months awaiting trial.
If you honestly would rather live next to the average person arrested for assault or robbery than Bankman-Fried while both await trial, be my guest, but you can probably understand why others might feel differently.
Like many things, cash bail is effectively "discriminatory" in that it tends to hurt poor criminals more than white collar ones. That still doesn't mean discrimination is the primary reason it exists, or that that somehow negates any of its benefits.
Out of curiosity, why do you think this? Grand theft of wealth based on fraud doesn't strike me as morally worse than gangbanging, armed robbery, human trafficking, etc.
(To detail my own calibration, I would say someone like Henry Kissinger is morally worse than low-level criminals. Typically I think it goes theft < violence < warmongering, etc.)
Someone who is intellectually mediocre, grows up around violent scumbags, and ends up robbing others instead of working a job is reprehensible, but I would say less so than a Bernie Madoff who was already wealthy, highly capable, and decided to defraud people of their life savings over decades. Madoff is not someone like Martin Shkreli bullshitting wealthy investors out of some portion of their wealth, he's someone who ruined people's lives.
People often discount "economic" crimes that they can't directly see the harms of, like insurance fraud, welfare fraud, tax cheating, corruption etc. That's easy to do in places like the US, but becomes more obviously problematic in places like Southern Italy or Argentina whose economies have gradually been destroyed by a widespread acceptance of corruption, cheating and "economic" crimes.
There was a guy in Russia who became famous as the organizer of the largest financial pyramid in the country's history; it all fell apart very publicly, with many people losing their savings, and the guy was on the run for years until finally caught and convicted in yet another highly publicized court. That's it, right?
But literally as soon as he was out of prison, he starts a new company. Same exact name as before. And he openly advertised it as a financial pyramid this time! One year later, he walked away with millions more. And they couldn't even sue him for it because he was completely honest about the finances!
Then he went on to do the same shit but with crypto in other countries: India, China, Nigeria, Peru, Ghana, Thailand...
Street crime may be a better phrase.
That is explicitly factored into the decision of whether to grant bail and determining flight risk. It's probably not going out on a limb to say SBF's $250 MILLION dollar bail had something to do with his wealth and the flight risk it presented, and isn't standard procedure.
>If a criminal is deemed extremely likely to commit violent crime on bail, they simply shouldn't get bail, the amount they pay or are able to should be moot
This is also how it works right now. Sometimes established systems have gotten some things right in their thousands of years of development, even when they're not perfect. Presumably nobody's arguing the pudgy crypto fraudster who has never been so much as accused of a violent crime is "extremely likely to commit violent crime on bail."
I'm not so sure that's true... do you have data to support that? I can think of some counter examples pretty easily off the top of my head -- Billy McFarland, Michael Avenatti, etc.
Comments like this are really bizarre. It's like asking for "data" that says looking both ways before crossing the street is a good idea and reduces the frequency of pedestrian fatalities. Your two examples further OP's point. Those two people are asshole fraudsters, but they don't present a physical danger to people around them.
Since when is it "bizarre" to ask someone if they've based their assertion off of hard data? I replied to at-w's fairly remarkable claim that white collar criminals are less likely to harm people while out on bail than non-white collar criminals. That assertion is not a forgone conclusion like the wisdom of "look both ways before you cross the street". Clearly it's reasonable to ask the poster if they're basing their assertion off of some hard data.
> Those two people are asshole fraudsters, but they don't present a physical danger to people around them.
We're talking about the propensity to harm others while out on bail. Harm is not limited to physical harm. The two examples I gave were of white collar criminals who continued to defraud/extort others while they were out on bail.
“BUH BUH BUH WHERE IS YOUR EVIDENCE?”
I believe many/most white collar criminals are morally reprehensible people who often deserve far greater punishment than even violent criminals for the harm that they do. That doesn't change the fact that in the generally brief period awaiting trial, they are far less of an immediate threat to those around them than even a low-level violent criminal.
One third of incarcerated folks in the US are there for possession charges. Not intent to distribute, just possession. No bail hence incarceration. How is a person carrying weed a bigger threat to society than a scammer like SBF?
Additionally, an interesting question with regards to money is if he's stashed some of those customer funds somewhere. If he has, then even 250 million wouldn't necessarily be an insurmountable barrier since billions are missing. Of course regardless of whether he has access to such stolen funds he'd never need to post the bail as it's unsecured; he'd either abscond and not pay 250 million, or stay and not need to pay in the first place.
Suppose he owns the $400+ million in Robinhood equity that he, FTX, and others are currently in a legal battle over. That asset would be within the reach of the automatic default judgement in favor of government that comes with bail forfeiture, even if SBF had fled to a country without extradition.
To return to topic: yes, a person arrested for carrying weed is more likely to do the same again while on bail than this guy is to repeat his fraud while on bail. The fact that it makes no sense to incarcerate people for small time weed possession is a completely different matter.
Was it before he was let out on bail or after?
What makes someone who deals weed keep commiting crimes after they receive bail but with someone like SBF it's different?
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
Police do make a lot of drug possession arrests, but the actual prison population who are there for possession is nowhere near 33%.
In any case: it's clearly a minority, yet a sizable one.
Which two numbers? The only number I quoted is 20%, and that's for all drug inmates, not just possession. We don't have the numbers for possession, but they're surely much, much lower.
> One third of incarcerated folks in the US are there for possession charges.
In Most cases, it is the society which forces them to do shit. The same is not true for SBF or Holmes. They chose to fraud people out of choice.
The fact that there is a bail bond industry sounds horrible to me.
Bail has become a bit of a joke here.
Anyway I looked up Washington law and it seems the problem is that everyone has a right to bail, even those who are a great risk to public safety. Judges should have some discretion here.
Cash bail is a horrible, unjust system, but some of the replacements that have popped up are no good either, especially because they make people think that cash bail is the solution and you end up with society regressing.
We would like to know also. Our judges are off their rockers here.
I would honestly be ok with no or reasonable bail for income (like in California?) and then no leniency for not showing up to court.
Yes, what California has done is you cannot set bail at an amount someone cannot post, but judges can deny bail for those deemed a public safety threat or those who have skipped bail. Individuals are assessed based on “risk to the community” and whether they get bail is based on that. Seems reasonable to me.
Very good changes! Very empowering for her
This is, in various ways, unfair. But the point of the bail system isn’t doing
justice. It’s ensuring that people show up for trial.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/carlos-ghosn-inside-the-rise...
We'd expect a very high conviction rate in very bad systems because of corruption and because such systems might be meant just for show.
However, we'd also expect a very high conviction rate in very good systems. Before a case gets to trial in a very good system first it would be investigated by police. Only if the police think there is a worthwhile case would it go to prosecutors. Then some prosecutor has to decide they have enough evidence to stand a good chance of conviction. There would probably be more review taking into account overall prosecutorial load to make sure they won't be devoting limited resources to a case they might lose.
The only cases that reach trial should be cases that the prosecutor is very sure they will win, so of course we should see a high conviction rate if the prosecutors are competent.
Plus I believe that any justice system that traces its roots on a past hierarchical system (ex: monarchy, dictatorship, communism) without any revolutions to change it is heavily biased & distorted from reality for other political inclinations.
As to the latter bit, I think that's all current justice systems. Certainly the one here in the US, which inherited English common law and then added on a two-tiered justice system for race-based slavery.
People who have nothing have nothing to loose when dodging bond. Rich people have something to loose, so they can held by posting a bond. There's a tradeoff between making the system fair (nobody gets out of jail) and making the system as lenient as possible (people who can post bond get out - but be aware that quite a few innocent people await trial, which would then be jailed as well).
SBF posted no money here, so by your logic he should be locked up right now.
The chance of a alleged drug Smuggler or violent Criminal reoffending before trial is higher.
While the justice system should be blind to the economic situation of the defendant, that doesn't mean it has to be blind to common sense
He could have handed some of that money to unknown criminal associates. Anything done with them could be more and possibly new crimes.
But if we just look at the chances of reoffending, I think confinement to one's parents house with an ankle bracelet and frequent checkins is more likely to prevent drug smuggling than further financial crimes. Most drug smugglers at least can recognize that what they did is a crime, so they appear to be ahead of SBF here.
And my question here is really not just about broad categories of crime, but about specifics of the situation. What do the stats look like for, say, cherubic and well spoken young white men from upper-class backgrounds compared with other groups? I know that I as a youth got away with a lot, and I suspect it was due to factors like that. Seeing SBF get the soft landing here makes me wonder how things go for people who don't look and sound like him.
You've uncovered the unjust nature of the cash bail system as a whole. The efforts being made to get rid of it in California are a huge step forward toward making the system more equitable.
It’s gotten to the point that non-felony offenses mostly just get ignored by police, and theft is skyrocketing everywhere.
There are places that think it is a good idea to make covid bail policies permanent. The experiment is running now.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191247/reported-larceny-...
Polls before the last election said everyone thought crime was going up... Somewhere else.
It’s gone from occasional, ‘tries to hide it’ shoplifting to brazen ‘runs off with a shopping cart full of tools/baby food/electronics in the daylight daily’ in a handful of years.
Stores are changing their display practices to try to compensate (locking up anything over a certain dollar threshold), but it’s easy to bypass. Last week when talking to one guy (Home Depot in Santa Clara) while buying a power tool, he said they’d had over $14k taken in the last few weeks alone from that store. I’ve seen folks do the runs myself while picking up Electronics too. The staff just sighs, takes a note, and continues on with their day.
Notably, it seems like it’s co-ordinated. when talking to the staff, they say it’s a different person each time, but very frequent now. shrug
Is it possible that criminal groups are doing some organized shoplifting? I'd believe it. But this may be just a change in method for existing criminals. Or it may be that we're hearing about it more because it's a topic that has gained sudden media interest. In any case, that cuts against your theory that the cops don't care, because doing it in bulk or in an organized fashion will turn it from a misdemeanor to a felony, making cops much more interested. And indeed, SF just announced results from exactly that kind of operation: https://sfist.com/2022/12/16/sfpd-touts-60-arrests-in-new-re...
Just like the link you posted.
If it’s too easy to prosecute low level folks, the friction is too high.
Glad they’re going after the rings at least!
It’s often part of the same platform too - at least for Chesa Boudin.
[https://sfstandard.com/politics/the-recall-of-chesa-boudin-h...]
Note also you are once again conflating pre-trial detainment with post-trial punishment. People presumed innocent should not be generally kept off the streets.
Even given the (dubious and ineffective) goal of keeping people off the streets, a removal of cash bail would in theory make them work even harder, so that a) true repeat offenders would receive the sort of escalating penalties that would put them away for a long time, and b) people failing to abide by the terms of their non-cash bail would not be allowed back out again. So the end of cash bail should make them more dedicated.
But Boudin is material here. SF cops sandbagged on doing their job because they didn't like him. He was foursquare for a modicum police accountability and they hated that. And if you'd like to post nominal facts about the Boudin recall, please don't use ones from a publication wholly funded by one of the people who paid for the Boudin recall.
They have tighter margins due to competition, so they lock stuff down more, leading to a much worse shipping experience, leading to more people shopping online. It's a death spiral.
There's certainly more reporting of shoplifting in SF in the last couple years, but it's only a part of the story, and evidently not a general trend, or we would see it in higher level statistics.
If you wish to treat everyone the same then you must either use excessive violence in some cases, or accept that others are not going to be controlled.
SBF, regardless of the truth of his claim that he only has $100k in a particular bank account, almost certainly has anywhere from some to quite a lot of wealth to lose [0] (whether any of it is likely to remain after fines, forfeitures, etc. in the current criminal case is another story.)
[0] e.g., there is currently a legal dispute between SBF, FTX, and others over who owns a $400+ million stake in Robinhood.
It’s true that your access to resources in a pinch is not always aligned with cultural or consumption-based class markers. For example the family in Winter’s Bone clearly reads as poor, even though Jessup’s bond is paid-off house and acres of timber forest. Conversely, you could imagine a financier whose relationships are all burned and whose assets are all wiped out. But having something to lose is still going to be correlated with class on balance.
I look forward to seeing your data on that, but knowing plenty of both rich and poor people, I'm not going to assume it's correct. A lot of the poorest people I know are the ones richest in social ties. And vice versa, at least if we're counting the sort of meaningful ties that would make one more likely to stay in one place while the machinery of justice works.
I think you're missing the point.
The guy broke the law to the tune of BILLIONS of dollars, and he gets to sit around at home while waiting for trial. He is with his family, living however he wants. Eating great food, drinking, relaxing. Enjoying himself.
Regular criminals who break the law to the tune of hundreds of dollars are forced to sit in jail while they wait for trial. Jail sucks. You do NOT get to enjoy yourself.
That's the point.
Overestimating I think - he's 30 according to wikipedia, so 20 years is 50, unless you're taking into account some early release or parole program.
according to the state of California it cost them over $106 thousand per inmate per year. Surely at that price letting them take care of themselves is better for any nonviolent crime, or any crime where the odds of recidivism during their sentence while under house arrest is sufficiently low?
I think it's fairly standard if you were released on bail prior to sentencing, but I don't have the statistics
Btw legendary monologue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgL_5QcZCMo
Also, you seem pretty eager to make people suffer in jail even though they have not been convicted of a crime. Just because it sometimes happens doesn't justify it happening to everyone.
he was arrested in the bahamas, the bail terms came AFTER the arrest. How the hell does someone breach bail terms before they're arrested?
He hasn't been convicted of a crime. Why should he be in jail?
> Regular criminals who break the law to the tune of hundreds of dollars are forced to sit in jail while they wait for trial. Jail sucks. You do NOT get to enjoy yourself.
It sounds like you support bail reform then, which has been a big thing recently in California and New York!
> That's the point.
The point absolutely is NOT to imprison people who have not been convicted of a crime. The point is to imprison people who have been convicted of a crime, and then maybe also temporarily imprison people pre-trial if they pose an imminent threat to the community (which SBF does not).
because he’s connected enough to avoid getting jailed again even if he gets convicted
The "nothing bad will happen to SBF because he's connected" narrative has already been shown to be false, find some new material.
He should be in jail because he very likely has the hidden resources to flee and escape prosecution if he so chooses.
You mean, you think he’s risk tolerant enough that it is likely he will reveal his hidden assets if he is released on bail under strict supervision?
That points system seems like an infinitely better idea than advocating that shitty conditions and mistreatment be applied evenly across all people. Presumption of innocence, right? No matter what we all think, SBF has not been proven -- in the way that matters -- to have broken the law.
i don’t feel a particular need to start paying to house him any sooner than necessary.
we’re all going to be stuck with that bill for most of the rest of his life.
One reason to stay within the law is that even due process can be a rather nasty experience, and generally to be avoided if possible. The threat of rape in US prisons is repeatedly referenced in "cultural products" coming out of LA. It is pretty odd when you think about it: systemic abuse is taking place and blockbuster films reference it and apparently the government doesn't care.
So sure, the bail is for preventing flight. It is not about justice. But ultimately the "justice system" is also not there to do "justice": it is ultimately there to insure societal stability and harmony. When a people get the sense that "the system" is stacked, and gives preferential treatment to special people, it undermines the very purpose of a justice system.
So tptacek, the justice people are talking about is simply the obvious this: If Joe Schmoe had pulled the scam of century, he would have had ample time to meet his cell mates in Bahamas in "scary prison", and, also get to know the fellows in cell block whatever over here, in the land of "sodomy in prison is a feature not a bug" USA.
That kind of justice.
Okay, but what's the alternative here? Have a bail/trial by public opinion so the results are maximally aligned with what the public wants?
There's also the alternative of making the justice system more humane, but like you said:
>One reason to stay within the law is that even due process can be a rather nasty experience, and generally to be avoided if possible. The threat of rape in US prisons is repeatedly referenced in "cultural products" coming out of LA. It is pretty odd when you think about it: systemic abuse is taking place and blockbuster films reference it and apparently the government doesn't care.
The government doesn't care because the public doesn't care. It's hard to garner sympathy for suspects. I suspect that in the depictions you speak of, the thought that goes through the average audience's head is "criminal getting their just desserts", not "this is a failure of the criminal justice system because someone is effectively being punished before they're convicted".
https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/upload_documents...
The key issue is societal harm. For example above discusses bail considerations for serial rapists, etc. I pointed out that societal harm can also occur when a perception of distinct treatment for different classes of society reaches a critical threshold of society, it will result in societal harm. It's a sort of meta-harm to society, specially in today's political environment, societal harm to the people of United of States of America is anything that increases divisions, and diminishes trust in institutions, in my opinion.
Meanwhile, if someone pulls off the scam of the century, they are no longer a Joe Schmoe. They will have a lot of money to spread around while the scam is happening. Especially in a small Caribbean nation.
Right [emphasis added]: "he would have had ample time to meet his cell mates in Bahamas in "scary prison".
Thank you for spelling this out. It's not ok that this sort of baying for blood is given a cloak of righteousness when it is aimed at a suspect of criminal conduct.
When you've got personal wealth in the hundreds of millions, yeah, "hollywood plots" are indeed a concern.
When your sample size holds no statistical significant, there are no useful overall statistics.
My guess (but numbers hard to come by, to my point), is there have only been a handful of billionaires arrested for anything, even in most states. Ever.
There are several orders of magnitude difference between billionaires and multi millionaires. They aren’t even on the same page.
When I Google Billionaire arrested I get a flood of responses with names.
I would argue that at least individuals with 100 plus million have the similar capacity for flight AS billionaires. You could probably come up with an extensive list of US celebrities that have been arrested in this category
All in different jurisdictions, with wildly different circumstances, and little overlap in types of crimes and ability to flee, no?
Those are individual points, not statistically significant data. Which is my point.
I'm willing to concede that we don't have a ton of apples to apples comparators. I do think there is a lot of general data, but as you point out, there are a lot of caviats.
I frankly couldn’t even guess.
What was Ghosn’s of escaping house arrest?
SBF doesn't have that, though. He lost access to FTX's funds. He doesn't have anything he can give to anyone that would motivate them to do that for him. No money, no influence, no ability to reward anyone in any way. He is poison and nobody wants anything to do with him.
Whether they actually have some arbitrarily higher figure is not relevant to that point.
If a person ripped off a million people, it’s a tentative assumption that they wouldn’t rip off their parents too.
If my child was facing decades in prison for a non-violent crime with mitigating circumstances then I would sacrifice my home in a heartbeat, so its tentative from that direction too. I’m sure SBF could also pay them back easily enough.
He likely has substantial resources to aid any escape and a history of extradition. So he has the means.
We have the ankle tag, but if that is a foolproof solution then there wouldn’t even need to be a bail system as pretty much everyone could be tagged until trial.
If you were facing 100 years in prison after the fall from grace he has had, surely a private jet to Russia looks to have very appealing odds?
> His parents co-signed the bond, meaning they are on the hook for that amount (which they can’t pay, obviously) if he breaks the terms of the bond.
In addition to that, they are required to pledge their home equity.
If he flees, they are screwed. They have a very strong incentive to make sure he makes his court date.
Unless they flee too, to a country that doesn't have extradition. Given the good chance he has countless millions stashed somewhere, this is definitely a non-zero chance. It is also made more likely due to the political connections SBF and his family have due to the tens of millions of dollars he has funneled to politicians. While not necessarily likely, it is far from impossible (anyone who thinks it is should look up Mark Rich). If anyone should be locked up without bail while waiting trial, it is SBF.
Besides, why is SBF in the USA right now? He could have tried to stay in the Bahamas. He came here because he knows that his chances with other countries’ justice systems are far worse. And what country in the world would give him shelter? He ripped people off all over the world. Anywhere he might go, there is a strong chance he would be arrested there.
What was in it for Bill Clinton when he pardoned Mark Rich?
>Besides, why is SBF in the USA right now? He could have tried to stay in the Bahamas.
In the Bahamas he was in jail. Hours after landing in the USA he is in a mansion in California. Is it really that hard to understand?
Think about the long term. He knows he is screwed. He is choosing where he will serve his time.
Yes, it is. I’d endure extreme life threatening hardship for a few months if it meant a decent chance at avoiding a likely multi decade prison sentence, even if I got to hang out in a mansion for a few months before prison. It’s hard to imagine a rational person doing otherwise.
Layers and Criminal reform advocates talk about this a lot, actually. Being in pre trial jail is actively destroying their lives. It is one of reasons for why most cases enver even end up in trial.
> How, you may ask, does a dude who is so clearly impervious to reality, who had to be arrested in the Bahamas, and who is accused of billions of dollars in fraud, get out on bail? Fair question.
Why shouldn't he get out on bail?? He hasn't been convicted of a crime. He's not posing an imminent risk to the community that requires keeping him locked up while he hasn't yet been proven to have done anything wrong.
> So: is the bail surprising? Yes. Is it a travesty of justice? That’s a philosophical question. Is it legally wrong, or outside the scope of what can or should happen under the federal bail system? No.
I don't find the bail surprising at all. Getting bail is routine. Sure, many people can't afford it, but obviously SBF can (and this article spells out exactly how).
> > How, you may ask, does a dude who is so clearly impervious to reality, who had to be arrested in the Bahamas, and who is accused of billions of dollars in fraud, get out on bail? Fair question.
>Why shouldn't he get out on bail?? He hasn't been convicted of a crime. He's not posing an imminent risk to the community that requires keeping him locked up while he hasn't yet been proven to have done anything wrong.
The article is framed that way because it seems to be a fairly popular belief that whether you're granted or denied bail should be dependent on the severity of the crime you're accused of (ie. you're accused of stealing billions, then you should be denied bail). Of course, that's not how the bail system works, but I can understand why people might believe that. To an first approximation, that theory fits with casual observations of when bail is granted or denied. For instance, shoplifting isn't a very serious crime and bail is likely to be granted, but murder is a serious crime and bail is likely to be denied.
In reality, we have to deal with things like serial killers (where even though they could be innocent, it's dangerous to have suspected serial killers in public) or flight risks. Jail and bail are our solutions to these issues. But this should be seen as something we do reluctantly and only when necessary, not as a punishment.
2. The US has the highest incarceration rate per capita.
3. The outrage bait of this article is to promote class divisions, that somehow being poor leads to one conclusion and rich to another WRT bail.
4. His parents put up their house (suppose it's worth $6 megabucks), he has to wear an ankle monitor, they took his passport, and he can't have firearms in his possession. It's curious that he was allowed to "make bail" against $250 megabucks for presumably much less than a "bail bond" would charge.
5. It appears they will be fighting this with pricey lawyers rather than plutocrat island escape plan 7.
> In that case, his parents’ house in Palo Alto, Calif., which was used to secure the bond, could be seized by the government.
Interestingly, the home is not located in Palo Alto, but in Stanford — which is a critical difference because it means that his parents (both Stanford faculty members) likely do not actually own the property. Stanford sells time-limited ground leases to faculty, which means that they cannot sell the property (or promise it) to anyone who is not a qualifying (tenure line) faculty member, or the university itself.
I don't know if the NYT is misreporting this, or if SBF's parents have signed a document promising something that they legally cannot make good on (grant rights in a property that they do not themselves hold). I'd guess it's the former, but who knows!
Source: I am familiar with Stanford's faculty housing programs and live in restricted faculty housing
As a result, while what you said is true, I don’t think it matters that much. At the end of the day, it’s an asset that’s worth millions of dollars.
But the bigger picture is that SBF's parents cannot have signed over the right for the government to seize the property. They do not own a fee simple interest in the land. They have a ground lease that lasts a few decades (the limit is currently 51 years, but they bought decades ago when it may have been different).
Is the house worth millions? Yes. Can the government seize it? Stanford would say no because the residents are not the fee simple owners.
Does your Stanford home has a mortgage on it? If so, I assume you signed a deed of trust somehow.
1: https://stanfordfsh.prod.acquia-sites.com/sites/default/file...
"[Prof] will have to leave his house 10 years after he retires from Stanford or 51 years after he moved in — whichever comes first — at which point he will sell it back to the university, making a modest profit (appreciation is capped at about 3% per year). That means he can’t pass it down to his daughters." https://extras.mercurynews.com/whoowns/stanford.html
Of course, rules may have also differed decades ago, when the home was apparently purchased.
“Oh no we accidentally paid bail with worthless assets and didn’t touch our billions in stolen goods”
If you could afford a $5 million house, what would be the reason to buy it from Stanford and not on the open market? Is it at a market discount considering the cap on ROI?
Would you consider the options available in the listing [0] the cheapest way to get housing in the area?
He should be so happy he gets 6 months or so to live a semi-normal life under intense supervision and restriction of movement before he likely gets sent away forever like Madoff, Alan Stanford and many others. Being rich hardly means favoritism in the sense of avoiding justice.
The justice system should be blind, but not to facts and reason
Rich families are. I assume his accounts and assets are entirely frozen. His parents put up their house to secure his bail. [1]
https://fortune.com/2022/12/19/sam-bankman-fried-bahamas-cou...
https://youtu.be/nmPS_ydgra0 (around 1hr in)
What the hell is wrong with people. He didn't kill anyone. He's probably a criminal - but until he's convicted he's not a danger to himself or others and should not be in a jail cell.
And I don't care if it happens to others - two wrongs don't make a right. We should scrap cash bail for the entire country and fix our justice system, not become a rabid mob demanding everyone suspected of a crime spend time in jail until proven innocent.
No-paywall: https://archive.vn/0HWBA
-----
Her husband didn't directly advise, but his firm did.
"Island of Incarceration" https://www.nps.gov/alca/index.htm
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/bahamas-jail-ftx-sam-ban...
I think it is more accurate to say that reflects the values of the people in power. And that is primarily people who have wealth.
First, the conspiracy theorists said SBF would never be charged or arrested. Apparently he "bribed" politicians. (But even if that was true, how would one expect a politician to be corrupt enough to be bribed, yet noble enough to stick their neck out to assist a fellow criminal who got caught?)
Then, they said he would not be extradited. Turns out he wanted to be, because being processed through the US justice system was preferable to being in jail in the Bahamas.
Now, they are saying he will somehow manage to escape, even though nobody has an incentive to help him do that, and many people involved have very strong incentives not to help him -- and if he really wanted to go into hiding, he could have done that anytime before he was arrested in the Bahamas.
Once that nonsense is over with and he shows up for his trial, people will claim that sure, SBF will be tried, but he won't be convicted! However, several of his close colleagues have just pleaded guilty to the same kind of crimes he is accused of, which is a very strong indication that they are cooperating with the prosecution and giving them all sorts of information.
If he is convicted, people will say, sure, he was found guilty, but his sentence will just be a slap on the wrist! The same was said about Elizabeth Holmes, and it was wrong.
On the other hand, the non-conspiracy-theorist mind sees the system working the way it is supposed to. Guy commits financial crime. Guy gets charged, arrested, and extradited to the US to stand trial for that crime -- in record time! It normally takes the US government a lot longer to put such a complicated prosecution together.
So, again, the system is working, and it's working faster than normal!
Granted Cotton was in India so records are murkier, but SBF probably had 2 orders of magnitude more money hidden away on keys only he knows.
He won’t even need plastic surgery — a decent haircut and no one would recognize him.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/31/what-netflixs-q...
Now I could be wrong on this, time will tell, but I was right about SBF being released on bail (Madoff was released, too): SBF is going to plead guilty. If he does, then, like Madoff, he will be sent to a detention center while awaiting sentencing.
SBF should be thankful that he gets to spend one last xmas with his family.
BTW, Judge Abrams has now recused herself from this case citing a perceived conflict of interest. Not sure how long it will take for this to hit the news. Her husband works for a law firm that represented FTX.
The whole situation seems like a lesson about the dangers of hubris and entitlement.
If someone fails to show up in court not because he forgets, but because, for example, he flees the country, how is he expected to keep the promise? In case of SBF, as I understand, his parents and some other people would have to pay some part of that 250m (because they can't afford the entire sum before going bankrupt), but is that it?
In addition to that, there probably isn't anywhere he could flee to that would not put him on trial or send him back to the US. FTX screwed customers in many countries.
Plus, the guy doesn't have any money. He lost access to FTX. How would he pay for his escape? Why would anyone be willing to risk helping him? Everyone who had anything to do with him or FTX is trying very hard right now to distance themselves.
Given all of that, I don't think it's unreasonable for a judge to decide that SBF's flight risk is below the bar that would normally be required to deny bail.
No, you just have to have the court believe the combination of penalty, security, sureties, and non-financial conditions is sufficient to assure appearance.
In some state systems, the court may be constrained to only accept full secured bond when there is a penalty amount (or, if not so constrained, may have a practice of generally doing so), but that is absolutely not a requirement or the normal practice in the federal system.
No, you don't. Even with a fully secured bail bond (which is not a norm in all US jurisdictions), you (or someone acting as your surety) provides the court with a legal claim on property with a value at least equal to the bail amount. When (as is the norm in many syate systems) you engage a bail agent as a surety, the fee may be risk sensitive, or it may be a fixed percentage set by law, depending on state law.
Eh? This meant at all seriously or totally tongue in cheek?
No prosecutions.
People argue there was one or two but they were incidental. Instead just fines were paid and probably made up for in months.
So this in comparison might be amazing.
https://features.marketplace.org/why-no-ceo-went-jail-after-...
In the case of SBF there is pretty clear evidence that he broke laws.
If there was such clear evidence about anyone in 2008, they definitely would have been prosecuted. Prosecutors love to grandstand, and if they thought they could nail the people who "caused the recession" they would have been tripping over each other to be the first to do it. The fact that it never happened is convincing proof that they had no case.
Of course SBF should be prosecuted, but the fact no CEO was even charged after 2008 means there was something far more corrupt at play, it was politics, they feared the repercussions of inhibiting the profit makers, pension funds and retirement plans would have collapse.
SBF is "easy" because no repercussions.
It doesn't mean that, but it might make you suspect that!
Losses in the market for private label residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS) were at the epicenter of the financial crisis from 2007-2009. Existing research has shown that a substantial portion of the poor performance of the loans securitized in this market was caused by fraudulent origination practices and that these practices were misrepresented to investors who purchased securities based on these loans. However, to date no paper has estimated the effects of mortgage fraud on losses from foreclosure in this market. This paper fills this gap by 1) Accounting for total losses from foreclosure due to no/low documentation loans which were known colloquially within the industry as Liar's Loans, and 2) Estimating what portion of these losses can be considered excess from the perspective of the investor. Losses are considered excess in the sense that they were higher than the expected losses for investors, had the loan quality information disclosed to them been accurate, instead of fraudulent. I find that Liar's Loans account for roughly 70% of total losses, and 36% of losses in Liar's Loans can be considered excess. Projected to the level of the entire market, this implies that $345 billion of the $500 billion in losses from foreclosure are accounted for by Liar's Loans. Roughly $125 billion, or 25% of total market losses, can be considered excess losses caused by fraud in Liar's Loans.
From https://peri.umass.edu/publication/item/1008-liar-s-loans-mo...
This government financial regulator explicitly allowed backdating capital infusions. They cooked the books. Not prosecuted. Kept the sweet federal pension.
"Dochow knew that IndyMac couldn't meet its capital requirements and allowed it to record a capital infusion six weeks before it occurred."
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=6514493&page=1
And in 1989 Dochow similarly pulled a not-regulate stunt with a failing S&L.
"As federal regulators were preparing a file against Lincoln’s CEO, Charles Keating Jr., Dochow ordered his staff “to cease all examinations of Lincoln Savings, all supervisory acts with regards to Lincoln Savings"'
https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/e...
How strange to negate mountain loads of evidence with a single religion-like self-defending assumption. Of course you would believe that yours is a society of Law if you actively ignore all evidence to the contrary.
He is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law before a jury of his peers, who must be convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Do we all know he did it? Yes. But a jury hasn't ruled on it yet and until then he is legally speaking innocent. He must have his chance to face his accusers and present his arguments and present his own evidence.
Due processes must be fallowed. If we don't fallow due process and presume innocence than anyone can be imprisoned at any time for anything on trumped up charges because prosecutors and police simply say they have evidence whether or not it is true. at that point trials are nothing but farce and we have fallen into tyranny.
>Of course you would believe that yours is a society of Law if you actively ignore all evidence to the contrary.
While our society is far from living up to our own ideals, giving up on those ideal because we haven't always met them is not the answer; we should instead endeavor to adhere to them more fully. To do otherwise is nothing but a societal nihilism.
If you have assets to put up equivalent to the cash bail amount or get a bail bond, then no one cares.
If you don't have zillions, then you're stuck in pauper's prison (pretrial detention) like some 800k people.
The US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet except Seychelles.
> "The bottom line is that this result may shock people, but it is consistent with federal bail law. That’s likely why the government agreed and not — as conspiracy theorists are already shouting — because of some political pressure in his favor."
The obvious counterpoint is that 'consistent with federal bail law' is not much of an argument, as there appears to be a great deal of discretionary privilege, aka 'choice', on the part of judge / prosecution - i.e. not granting bail would also be 'consistent with federal bail law' so that doesn't explain much at all.
Incidentally, judges granting special treatment to members of the privileged Stanford community in criminal cases is not a very good look. Just ask ex-judge Aaron Persky.
The article covers this. Federal bail law has a presumption that defendants will get bail unless there is a good reason to believe they are a flight risk or might re-offend before the trial starts.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/22/chelsea-mann...
As an enlisted member of the military, she went though a court-martial under Uniform Code of Military Justice, which are a different set of laws that don't even have the concept of bail. So different rules apply.
But still, they do have roughly equivalent rules around pretrial restraint and needing to prove that confinement is actually necessary (especially since the military can eliminate flight risk by simply confining them to base). Even at the time there was much (justified) criticism that her treatment was a "degrading and inhumane pretrial punishment"
> "A federal appeals court on Monday denied a request by the former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to be released from jail on bail..."
Civil contempt of court is handled under yet another set of laws. And those laws don't appear to have the same presumption of bail that the laws dealing with criminal pre-trial detention.
Which kind of makes sense, it's not the same thing; Criminal trials have bail because it might take months or years of delays for the prosecution and defence to build a case. Here, the court has ordered you directly to jail as a punishment for not following their order; You can leave at any time by complying with the court order.
That's a gross mischaracterization of what the author said. The author is pretty clearly arguing (a) that this is just how the federal bail system works, but also (b) it's a good question whether this system, which treats white collar criminals much better in general, is fair.
The part I'm particularly enraged about is the (b), but I also think it is a bullshit conspiracy theory that SBF somehow got off easier because a parent once worked in the same department as someone who now is at the SEC.