New electronic monitoring technologies have the potential to significantly decrease the financial burden of bail on both defendants and states, according to a recently published paper by Florida State University Assistant Professor Samuel Wiseman.
But first, he argues in the paper, the judiciary has to subdue the bail industry.
Because electronic monitoring allows defendants to be easily located and limits the need to detain them at state expense, it can reduce both fugitive rates and government expenditures.
However, neither legislative nor executive action is likely to promote widespread pre-trial electronic monitoring, because of bail industry lobbying.
“The commercial bail industry has a significant financial incentive to maintain the status quo, and it has repeatedly blunted previous reform efforts,” Wiseman writes.
Wiseman suggests the end-around for legislative and executive inaction is judicial challenges under the Eighth Amendment's ban on excessive bail.
Read the paper HERE.