Bail bondsman in Longview, Texas
— Photo by Steve Snodgrass
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Many criminal defendants, the Connecticut Mirror reported the other day, can't "claw their way out" of pre-trial detention because they can't afford even the small cash bails required of them. It's easy to see cash bail as a problem since, according to the Mirror, more than 40 percent of the people held in Connecticut's prisons are not yet convicted but being held pending trial or other resolution of the charges against them.
But a close reading of the Mirror's report suggests that cash bail may not be the problem at all. At least the particular defendant chosen by the Mirror as proof that cash bail is unfair and even racist makes the claim laughable.
For the defendant has been spending so much time in prison prior to conviction not because the cash bail required of him is unfair but because he has been and remains a chronic offender.
The defendant has been convicted of threatening and, many times, for violating probation, leniency given to him in the hope that he would start behaving. Now he is charged with domestic violence, breach of peace, and violating a protective order and is under investigation for road rage. On top of that, he long has suffered from mental illness.
While he is only 34, the defendant already has spent seven years in prison. He told the Mirror that he has been in criminal trouble since he was 14 for, among other things, selling and using drugs and stealing cars and car parts.
The judge who set the cash bail challenged by the Mirror's report, $45,000, quite reasonably attributed it to the defendant's chronic misbehavior even while on probation.
The defendant says he has been trying to go straight but he plainly keeps failing. So should he remain free, with no consequences for violating probations and a protective order while he amasses new charges? That would make a mockery of the law, though of course the defendant already has made a mockery of it just as the criminal-justice system itself has done by failing to put away for good another chronic offender. Connecticut is swarming in chronic offenders even as elected officials lately have boasted about the decline in the state's prison population.
Part of the problem here is that the COVID pandemic stalled most court cases for two years, and catching up won't be quick. But as the decline in the prison population shows, the courts, the General Assembly and the governor aren't seeking to lock up more people. The courts are seeking to maintain some plausibility for the law, and chronic offenders make that much harder.
Outside of religious orders, poverty is not much of a virtue. With many people, including the defendant laughably lionized by the Mirror, poverty is largely self-inflicted. Could the Mirror really not find a defendant with a bail problem who isn't still causing trouble even after seven years in prison?
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Some in the political left lately has been using various mechanisms to prevent contrary expression, as by shouting down speakers and demanding the dismissal of politically incorrect college professors. Such tactics are beginning to be seen as totalitarian and counterproductive.
So now the left is backing off a little and instead is trying to shame contrarians by accusing them of "punching down" -- that is, criticizing or bullying people with less power in society.
This shaming tactic is no more persuasive. For while certain movements may seem to have less power at the moment, they also may have momentum and may heartily deserve some "punching down" to keep them down.
In the early 1900s the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party in Imperial Russia had to operate underground and abroad to avoid capture and imprisonment by the czar's secret police. But by 1917 the Bolsheviks had taken over the government and were operating their own secret police.
In the 1920s the Nazi Party operated on the crazy fringe of German politics. By the 1930s it had become the largest party in the country's parliament and was assaulting its rivals in the streets. Then it took over the government and imposed bloody gangsterism.
In the 1930s the Chinese Communist Party was a small group of totalitarians hiding in the mountains of a remote province. By 1949 they had imposed tyranny on the most populous country in the world.
All three once-powerless movements killed millions of people because sometimes there isn't nearly enough "punching down."
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
