You're either a flight risk / threat to the community, or you're not. The ability to part with a couple grand doesn't change those facts. No one presumed innocent should sit in jail for months/years awaiting trial just because of their bank balance or lack thereof.
That no one is 100% a flight risk or not a flight risk but rather there is a spectrum and the question is to what a degree they are a flight risk.
In that world knowing that your parents will lose their home and you'll be directly responsible for powerful people losing significant sums of money if you run decreases (though can never totally eliminate) the odds of someone fleeing.
Alternatively you could argue that discerning if someone is a flight risk or not is prohibitively difficult so their willingness to have their parents / acquaintances indebt themselves on their behalf is a good enough proxy for their intent?
There's little evidence cash bail changes the calculus.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/cash-bail-reform-is... (motivated, but well cited)
> In places that have implemented cash bail reform, rates of pretrial re-arrest remain unchanged.
> At the same time, numerous studies show pretrial incarceration has a “criminogenic effect,” meaning that it increases rather than decreases crime. One study found that cash bail assignment was associated with a 6 percent to 9 percent increase in recidivism. After 23 hours in pretrial incarceration, any additional time in detention has been “associated with a consistent and statistically significant increase in the likelihood of rearrest.”
https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/2/21/22944871/new-york-bail-ref...
> Garden State voters enacted their own bail reform laws in 2014 after a special committee studied the issue for nine months with a group of prosecutors, lawmakers and reformers. The law took full effect in 2017 and after 5 years of implementation, it has apparently achieved its purpose. The number of people imprisoned pre-trial on bail of $2,500 or less fell from more than 1,500 before the bail reform laws to just 14 people last year, according to the New Jersey court system. At the same time, the rate of people awaiting trial who commit additional “indictable offenses” has remained flat at 13.8%. And the appearance rate — how often people awaiting trial come back to court — increased slightly last year, from 90% in 2019 to 90.9% in 2020.
> If someone's enough of a flight risk to earn $250M bail, their position on said spectrum seems pretty clear.
My understanding is that money was only one of many conditions of SBF's bail. Others included 24/7 onsite monitoring conducted by a third party at his expense.
So at least in this specific case there's more to the story than just other guaranteeing the money for the cash portion of his bail.
Unless I am missing something, the original commenter seems mad that the bail is easily met and he walks. How would letting him walk anyway fix it?
https://queenseagle.com/all/detained-until-proven-guilty
> Bryson’s son, whose name is being withheld for fear of reprisal, is one of 306 people incarcerated on Rikers Island whose pre-trial detention has lasted three years or longer. There are an additional 441 detainees who have been held for two to three years and nearly 1,000 who have been held for one to two years, according to the New York City Department of Correction.
Pretrial detention also puts the presumed-innocent person at near-certain risk of job loss and other negative consequences.
I'm sure the location of the jail and the Cost of Living of the surrounding area has an affect on the cost.
> Rikers Island costs half a million a year per detainee.
Which averages down to $1,369 a day or $57/hr per prisoner. Which is about the same cost as 2 average NYcops[0] (Maybe NYC is higher?) per hour.
So I guess the cost to house and the cost to retrieve are about the same minus the admin/paperwork? Although that assumes the 2 cops show up and the person is exactly where they say they are and go into custody without issue.
[0] https://www.indeed.com/career/police-officer/salaries/New-Yo...
Nevertheless, the real issue there is refusing to set trial dates and dragging out the proceedings, typically done in the hope of getting the accused to plea guilty so an up and coming DA can brag about their prosecution rate when they run for Governor.
Because the main purpose of the bail amount in his case is because bail secomes a virtually automatic default judgement, and its not as easy to keep a person out of reach of criminal process and all their assets out of reach of a default judgement in favor of the US government as to do just the former, so him and his parents being on the hook for the full value is a significant additional cost to attempting flight.
Those who are flight risks or ongoing threats to the community should not.
Their bank balance is irrelevant to the decision, and making it part of the decision winds up with precisely these sorts of goofy scenarios.
Is SBF a flight risk? Yes. Handle that via monitoring (as they're doing, clearly) and if he keeps wriggling around his release conditions, revoke his bail.
People show up in court at roughly the same rate whether there's cash bail or just plain bail; there's little evidence it moves the needle.