Bail Bondsmen and Oregon

Recently the bail bond industry has come under new criticism. Rising prison populations have prompted a reexamination of the bail bond system.¹

In most of the United States after an arrest you might find yourself paying a private bail bondsman to secure your pre-trial release. Not so in Oregon. Along with Illinois, Kentucky and Wisconsin Oregon has outlawed the use of bail bondsmen. Once a regular fixture throughout the nation, bail bondsmen fell into disfavor in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Manhattan Bail Project² in the early 1960s evaluated criminal defendants and recommended to the courts which defendants were good candidates for release without bail. From 1961 to 1964 the project demonstrated outstanding success in predicting which defendants would return to court without posting bail. The program was so successful that in 1966 President Johnson cited it when signing the National Bail Reform Act.³

Soon after the passage of the federal Bail Reform Act of 1966 Oregon passed its own bail reform legislation in 1973.⁴ This legislation brought the ten percent deposit to Oregon. The statute provided for release on the defendants recognizance; however, if a monetary security was required the defendant would pay ten percent of the security in cash to the state. This cut bail bondsmen out of the judicial process and eliminated bail bondsmen in Oregon.

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¹http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/bail-bond-prison-industry
²http://cspcs.sanford.duke.edu/sites/default/files/descriptive/manhattan_bail_project.pdf 
³Wald, Patricia M., "To Feel the Great Forces: The Times of Burke Marshall", 105 Yale L.J. 611, 617 (1995). 
⁴Kaye, Robert A., "Oregon's Ten Percent Deposit Bail System - Rethinking the Professional Surety's Role", 66 Or. L. Rev. 661 (1987).