The Royal Family

| 143 |

The saving grace of our justice system is that remarkable axiom, innocent until proven guilty. Be that as it may, each accused must place his head in the lion’s mouth. For not every axiom is honored, not every proof is infallible — and not all defendants are innocent. What will the judgment be? Yesterday, a man pursued his good or evil life. Today he stands inscribed in the master calendar of felonies. And tomorrow’s destiny refuses to announce itself. The sign reads: SILENCE: COURT IN SESSION. Thus authority reduces us to things, and how could matters be otherwise? A greyhaired, slender defendant, sitting beside me as he awaits his turn, whirls insanely round in his chair as if something bit him. Granted, he keeps obediently silent; chewing his lip, he struggles to sit still, but only a moment goes by before his demon, premonition of the lion’s mouth, gnaws at him again, and he quivers. Meanwhile, a hulking, bandaged, cornrowed defendant approaches the bench with his hands locked behind his back. He’s been named; he’s Line Twenty-Four. Should he refuse to offer his head to the gaping mouth, then certain fellow citizens, armed and numerous, will force him. But by our axiom, Leo may not bite in advance of a guilty verdict. Fairness, then — to say nothing of kindness — advises that the defendant’s freedom be provisionally restored, on condition that he not run away from the lion. Hold his collateral, then. Should he flee, it will be forfeit. What if, fearing the verdict, he prefers freedom to property of which his sentence might in any event deprive him? No worry — raise the stakes! Then he’ll require help from those who love him, which produces the ingenious result of holding his companions hostage for his good behavior. Unless he’s a monster, instinct will be deterred by the knowledge that should he vanish, his sister will lose her house, while the lion in any case hunts him. And that is why the whirling man and the hulking, cornrowed man sat beside me in the courtroom, waiting for their names to be called. They were not wearing the orange livery of unfreedom; they came in their street clothes. They might as well come. — We get ninety-six percent of all skippers, a bail bondsman in Spokane once boasted to me, with a tight smile. And I suspect that Domino was all too familiar with that statistic.

In our republic, collateral cannot be paid except in good hard money. (The felony bail schedule reads: CASH, SURETY BONDS, VISA OR MASTERCARD. NO PERSONAL CHECKS.) Why this is I cannot fathom. A deed of trust means even less to a court clerk than a defendant’s fate. Well, couldn’t there be an appraisal office for the former as there is for the latter? The state of California seems perfectly able to staff such establishments in order to tax my house. Never mind. Who, then, will accept the surety of a cashless soul? Not the judge, I assure you; nor the happy lawyers with their suitcoats off, neckties fluttering in the breeze, who sometimes may be seen carrying bag lunches, nor yet the cops whose doubleparked police cars rest as immune to meter maids as most cops themselves are to bribery. And so the accused, or, more likely, since he’s at this moment sitting upstairs in a cell, the friends of the accused, descend the Hall of Justice’s steps on which other lion’s-prey smoke cigarettes while keeping to themselves or else glaring nervously everywhere like that whirling man in court, and then the friends (what nice friends!) turn to the slow orange blinking of the BAIL OPEN sign for Barrish Bail Bonds, or to any of the other signals of rescue in that casino-like strip which more or less begins by the Inn Justice Bar & Hofbrau with Dad’s Bail Bonds, and Cable Car Bail Bonds, whose office resembles a fast food restaurant and whose motto reads: “WE NEVER SLEEP”—LOW RATES. Next comes De Soto Bail Bonds, followed by Al Graf Bail Bonds, an establishment which figures in this sketch, then the aforementioned Barrish, Ballestrasse (OPEN 24 HOURS), Puccinelli; and at right angles to all these, in the alley behind Cable Car Bail Bonds, my vision descries Curtis Howard, O’Reilly’s, McKenzie Green, Hutch and Hutch, King, De Cortez and then Sheila Lockett, who very pleasantly said when I rang her bell: No, I can’t help you; I’m sorry…

Thus that miniature Las Vegas where many an accused hits the jackpot of sunlight and kisses. But is this treasure imperishable American bullion, or fool’s gold? Bail can be revoked, you know.* On the other hand, some lucky souls’ cases get dismissed within days, and then sunlight endures unto death or the next arrest. Regardless, Judgment Day comes for all. Angels inscribe a name on one of the daily computer printouts affixed to the marble walls of the Hall of Justice — time to report to the lion, time for district attorney and public defender to gamble over the gambler’s fate. But up to that moment he’s free within due limits to spend the life he’s won — provided only (as I said) that his well-wishers can offer deeds of trust, stock certificates, or good safe municipal bonds.

That bail bondsman I met in Spokane didn’t mind accepting videocasette recorders or cameras as collateral. (What did he think, when somebody brought in two dozen television sets? Where had those televisions come from?) — In San Francisco it seems more difficult to meet with such catholic receivers. One can easily try, of course, for it was explained to me by ancient Al Graf, retired owner of the aforesaid Al Graf Bail Bonds, that each bondsman specializes in a very particular subspecies of client, just as each creed has its god, and each parasite its host. Somebody somewhere will take television sets. Why not try? Freedom Casino lies so conveniently situated right across from the lion’s mouth! — When you win in Vegas your slot machine says BAR BAR BAR. But for the lion-bound winners, all bars shall be sprung. A blood-vermillion sign blinks in a bondsman’s window.

Am I free to go? asks the defendant.

Yeah, you’ve got bail set, the judge replies.

I got bailed! he crows, rolling away in his wheelchair.

The judge sighs and sets a new trial date.

| 144 |

How much do you love me? — Easy to find out. I’ll beseech of you my resurrection. Then I’ll wait.

Ah, but how much will the ransom be? Well, how much should it be?

Gaunt, bald and overworked Ron Albers, one of the felony supervisors at the public defender’s office, tried to be civil, but the more questions I put, the more convinced he grew that I was a fool. To him, life came case by case, like the row of bail establishments each with its own policies; generalization equalled vacuity. I wanted to know whether he thought that the bail system was fair, and such inquiries exasperated him.

Fine, he said staccatto. Take possession of drugs. What’s an appropriate bail?

Well, I began, in relation to a violent crime—

No, he said. Tell me a number.

All right, a thousand dollars.

He shrugged and said (another verbal lunge): Fine. A thousand dollars. How about possession for sale?

Ten thousand.

Fine, he said challengingly. Ten thousand dollars. How about possession with conspiracy to sell?

Twice as much.

Okay, so that’s your system, said Albers a little contemptuously, and maybe it works for you. But nobody agrees, you see. Bail for the same crime varies wildly from county to county.

He was correct, and one need not compare the legal apples of San Francisco with the legal oranges of Sacramento to be unnerved by eccentric discrepancies. What were San Francisco’s judges thinking of, when they set bail for assault with attempt to rape at twenty thousand dollars — the same number as for rape itself? Leniency ought to be the watchword for an uncompleted crime, no matter what reason the ellipsis. Just as Dante’s hell contains circles of graduated misery, so should the bail system. That anomaly, the radiantly rational criminal, ought always to be reminded that no matter what he’s done, he’d be better off not doing worse. Fine, as Ron Albers would have said. Assault with or without penetration, with or without disease and escalated shame: Twenty grand. Fine. Meanwhile, kidnapping for purposes of rape became bailable at fifty thousand dollars. I suppose that carrying off one’s prey is more terrifying than laying hands on her where one finds her, but a courteous kidnapping might be preferable to a bloody assault (granted, the blood might comprise a separately bailable offense, but in that case what meaning remains to the word “assault”?). Vanilla kidnapping got bailed at five thousand dollars more than kidnapping for rape, I’ll never comprehend why; and the bail for rape-less assault varied between five and fifty thousand (but take heart, O you suffocating students of logic! We can, do and will, as bureaucrats say, “prioritize”—for it costs precisely three times as much to be suspected of attacking a fireman as to be accused of harming a bus driver. What would they bail me at, if I shattered their legal tablets?). Sexual battery (which essentially means fondling) was only ten thousand—fine, reasonable actually, proportionately Dantesque — but then incest had been priced at twenty-five thousand. If a brother and sister happily went to bed together and then a cousin called the cops, must their amusements necessarily be considered more terrible than ravishment by a monster? Where was the sense of it? And so to me the words on the San Francisco bail schedule — to say nothing of the fees — began to seem like careless and transitory exhalations.

The bitter truth of Ron Albers’s Fine was that in law there was no truth. Sometimes I’ve wished that every crime could be addressed by a single statute, perfectly drafted.* So it used to be: An eye for an eye. But what if I put out my brother’s eye by mistake? What if I did it in wartime, or slyly paid Domino to do it? And so the dust of confusions and exceptions dulled the glitter of the ancient, perfect laws. In their place, we learned to fire multiple laws out of justice’s shotgun, hoping that if one pellet didn’t bring down the criminal, maybe the next one would. Al Capone deserved to go to prison for his numerous murders and thuggeries, and so he did go — but for tax evasion. That was the pellet that got him. The district attorney takes aim and files charges—fires them, I should say — determined to prove his case. He fires multiple shots whenever he can, and each shot spreads constellations of leaden legal pellets. And the more charges stick, the more weighed down becomes the defendant by crushing bail.

This science is as easy as it is repulsive. An example: In Department Twenty-Two I heard a prosecutor insistently arguing: This was a case of GBI (great bodily injury) with use of a knife. The bail was only five thousand, which does not reflect the seriousness of the case!

When I got home I searched the felony bail schedule for San Francisco County and found:

PENAL CODE FELONY 245(a)(I) Assault (great bodily injury) BAIL $5,000

Indeed, if I meant to box in this suspected stabber (as a prosecutor must do), I might insist and argue against ordinary GBI in that same rising voice, for the bail bondsman’s ten percent weighs but five hundred dollars here. Very likely, the accused or his friends could support such a burden. So quick! Load the shotgun! On that very same page I found sweet mayhem. Somebody, possibly our defendant, has superficially cut the victim about the face, and in the process nicked off an infinitesimal portion of an earlobe. Thus mayhem, which is mutilation and bails at twenty grand. (Aggravated mayhem can go for more.) Were I the D.A., why not fire that one off?

This procedure being not only expedient, but also self-exculpatory, it gets applied at all levels. The defendant gets his day in court, and directly or through agents pleads his righteousness. The prosecutor (whose name is Legion, because he gets to call himself the people*) does the same. And the uniformed vice-hunters in their rolling black-and-whites, don’t they also want to justify themselves? When they take somebody in, it’s only human nature for them to show cause. Why not triply show it? — When you’re arrested, said Ron Albers, the person making the charge is the police officer. If he likes you, it’s possession. If not, it’s possession for sale. I think there’s no limit to the number of charges he can make. Let’s say you happen to be a person passing a bad check. They can charge you with uttering a bad check plus conspiracy to defraud plus possession of counterfeiting tools or whatever. Or you walk into Safeway and you want to steal a loaf of bread. Well, that’s petty theft, but entering the premises for purposes of petty theft can be burglary, and it becomes violent robbery if the security guard tries to stop you and you pull your arm away.

Needless to say, each new charge augments the bail bondsman’s ten percent. When the Salem witchcraft trials were in full flourish, they arrested a man named Giles Corey, who to save his estate would not plead innocent or guilty, so the magistrates in their wisdom directed that he be laid down upon his back in a dark room and slowly crushed to death with weights. Doubtless, many of the Giles Coreys whom we press with the less reprehensible weight of bail actually did the deed, and deserve to remain in the dark room for the duration. But remember the principle of innocent until proven guilty.

| 145 |

Thus the first flaw of bail, its absolute arbitrariness. (As a smart young lawyer once told me: The criminal justice system is an ad hoc system. It’s not logical.) The second flaw is its relative arbitrariness. How brittle is each Giles Corey’s ribcage? Does any given sum of bail weigh the same to me as to you? — We had one guy who was faced with seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars bail, Ron Albers said. The charges were very serious. What the person did, I don’t have to get into that. But bail could have been set at a hundred thousand; it wouldn’t have made any difference. He couldn’t have gotten out of jail. But another guy with a hundred-thousand-dollar bail did get out. He had enough resources to pay for an attorney to boot. Those were serious sexual assault charges. And some of the guys you saw in Department Twenty-Two today had bail set for five thousand dollars or less. They didn’t have the five thousand on their credit cards, and they didn’t have the five hundred plus collateral for the bail bondsman. So they’re sitting in jail.

In the elevator at Five Fifty-Five Seventh Street, I met a lady who often represented street prostitutes. The elevator was slow, so I inquired of her how often those types were able to make bail. — Almost never, she replied. — And a bargirl friend of mine whom I’ve visited in jail more than once (let’s call her Strawberry), assured me: I’ve never had bail in my life. And I don’t get a trial anymore either. It’s all parole violation.* They take me and lock me up. You shouldn’t be writing about bail. That’s irrelevant. You should tell people about what goes on in jail. What they like to do is beat you when you’re in the elevator, when they’re taking you up to your cell.

This being a novel, we need not sorrow over wretches such as Strawberry, who don’t even exist — I made her up out of three sad women I know — and the sad woman who alluded to the beatings she got was also quite practiced in weeping over her dead baby and then hitting me up for money; so let’s suppose that she never was beaten (although one time, and here I write not as a novelist but as a witness, I saw two policemen enter the back door of the place which we’ll call the Wonderbar, and march her into their squad car because she’d violated her parole again — which is to say, because she’d been sitting quietly at the Wonderbar — and when I strolled out to watch them and see if I could do anything to help Strawberry I saw one cop at the wheel while the other cop was sitting in the back seat beside Strawberry, whose head he now began to drag down into his lap.

Fifteen minutes later, she was back at the bar, dully pretending that nothing had happened.) Let’s suppose that our prisons tower uncorrupted by jailers’ violence, because that’s a pleasanter supposition, and, besides, the rottenness or purity of prisons may affect but cannot alter the fundamental stinking crookedness of bail, which is the crookedness of life. Let’s even suppose that Strawberry some red-shining evening (oh, ecstasy!) found herself legally eligible for bail. What then? Ask Mr. Roger Adair at Ace Bail Bonds in Sacramento. He is a clever, pleasant, practical man. He answers all questions. He says: If you’ve got a Six Forty-Seven case we don’t even deal with you. Six Forty-Seven is prostitution. If there’s even loitering involved, we won’t do it. We get such a small amount of money, and the hassle’s just not worth it. The meat and potatoes of what we do are domestic violence and methamphetamines.

| 146 |

Unlike birth, bail may occur at practically any phase of gestation within the lion’s barred womb — or, as Strawberry knows, it may never happen at all. (When a full-term defendant does get delivered, the prosecution may well consider it a miscarriage of justice. But never mind.) Arrest is conception; that’s when one’s implanted in the pit. But because most arrests are warrantless, the pregnancy’s not yet “in the system” until the second step when the defendant gets “processed”—that is, fingerprinted and otherwise inspected, recorded and made recognizable to the lion’s gaze. I have heard prostitutes protesting and even wisecracking with their arresting officers as they roll off to jail, but “processing,” like the sign which commands SILENCE: COURT IN SESSION, strips them of public entreaties, accusations, outcries. They’re in the cage now. — You can be bailed as soon as you’ve been processed, a public defender explained to me. Generally they want to get you out if they can. — And, of course, if the defendant can. Does he have the cash? There he is, upstairs in a cell with strangers who might be violent. (My friend B. told me how afraid he was of his new brothers on that long afternoon after arrest. He wasn’t sure whether to be friendly or inconspicuous.) But who knows? Maybe freedom’s jackpot will bust him out here and now. Should the accusation against him be sufficiently trivial, he’ll be cited to appear at a later date. This is what happened to B. Somebody came, some official somebody who owned the authority to decide that B. was too young and innocuous to lie in jail that night, and so B. staggered back into freedom’s twilight without paying a penny, released on his own recognizance, or O.R.’d as they call it. He has never been back in jail since.

Whether our defendant gets out or not, gestation now continues to the third step — namely, arraignment in court. Bail grows even more volatile here, like a feather dancing in the breath of a judge. One detainee’s five-thousand-dollar mistake is another’s twenty-thousand-dollar crime. A D.A. up in Sacramento spoke to me of a push to limit the number of people who review these things so we get more uniformity. (I myself would simply prefer a more uniform code of bail.) Arraignment must take place within forty-eight hours of arrest, and the defendant must be present. Bailed people thus do not entirely resemble cancer patients in blissful remission. How can they pretend it’s over? They must return to the lion’s jaws again and again. For a simple misdemeanor matter, the accused makes at least three appearances. For a felony, the minimum is five. — Felony cases may meander through many, many pretrial conferences. (With time, everybody relaxes, said a San Francisco public defender named Matt Gonzalez. It’s like, can we work a deal? But I have cases where a guy has appeared fifteen or twenty times. Ageing the case, they call it.)

Up to thirty days after arraignment comes the pretrial hearing, at which the judge either dismisses the charges or else sends them on for trial. Has the defendant made bail yet? If not, and if they won’t O.R. him, then, innocent or guilty, he’ll keep sitting in a cell. (Gonzalez again: In a felony case you can spend three months in jail and three more months waiting for a speedy trial, although that’s the worst scenario.*) He’s likely lost his job by now, if he had one. He’s not paying rent. Innocent until proven guilty, we said, but think about that rent. Think about those sinister nights of decay. And do you remember those three minimum appearances for a misdemeanor? How about making just one? Plead guilty, and it’s over. Remember those five felony appearances? If you can’t bring yourself to plead guilty, at least agree to drug counseling — that’s almost as good as admitting you’re wrong! The prosecutor will like you better, too. By thus validating your own arrest, you’ve proved him wise and righteous.

Well, the system is a little vindictive, Gonzalez agreed. It’s hard to dismiss a flawed case. Once you get wrapped up in the system, nobody wants to admit an error. And sometimes the system is just plain schizophrenic. For instance, take Department Eighteen. That’s misdemeanor domestic violence. If you plead not guilty, you can’t be released because you are deemed to be a threat to public safety. Bail’s generally set. If you plead guilty, you will probably be released immediately with a promise to attend counseling, even if you haven’t attended counseling before and you haven’t even seen a probation officer. By allowing that second option, aren’t we really saying, hey, we could really O.R. all these people? You’re innocent until proven guilty. The public safety thing is illusory.

| 147 |

A woman in an orange jumpsuit rubs her big, bewildered eyes. Her lawyer, a lady in tweed, lays a hand upon her arm. The woman in orange is led before the judge, expecting destiny, only to be told by the people: The deputy D.A. is on vacation and I don’t think he’s coming back until next month. — The woman does not understand. The people’s representative frowns at her and shakes her head. The accused felon clears her throat, craving to learn what will happen next, but she’s gently led toward the exit at stage left. The bailiff rattles his keys. He unlocks the door, which she enters, becoming a prisoner again, for how long nobody yet knows. But why on earth does she have a right to know? She’s but a detainee, poor and shadowy, like one of those Egyptians in the Book of Isaiah who find themselves forsaken by their idols. And I will give over the Egyptians into the hand of a hard master; and a fierce king will rule over them.† She cannot be proven guilty until next month at the earliest. Might she live her life until then? Might she descend those whitestone steps of the Hall of Justice, cross Byrant Street, and then wander home with the sun warming her pallid skin? It depends on the vagaries of bail.

I do think that it’s necessary for the system to make every effort possible to see that people are not unnecessarily inconvenienced, said Albert Locher, that supervisory deputy district attorney in Sacramento. — At the same time, he went on, the presumption of innocence is a presumption that attaches to a specific part of the proceedings, which is the trial process. But there are other parts of the process. Bail reflects not only the strength of the case but also the degree of danger. If you have a guy videotaped in an armed robbery with his fingerprints on the counter and the gun in his possession, you’re not going to find me or many other people wanting to let that guy out.

And so the presumed robber does not get out, and I’m with the people on that one; I’m not sorry. But the big-eyed woman in orange does not get out, either. Right or wrong, who’s to say? I don’t know her. But what does innocent until proven guilty mean to you?

The interminable pregnancy of justice continues. If a trial seems warranted, then the accused must stand for his second arraignment. There follows the trial itself, then the verdict, and then the sentencing. Another portion of somebody’s lifetime, converted into excrement, gets flushed down the toilet of a cell.

| 148 |

And now for the straight stuff, the vulgar poop: What impels the bondsman’s kindness? We said ten percent before, but did you truly lull yourself into equating simplicity with truth? — We’re supposed to charge a flat ten percent. — Thus Geri Campana, former flight attendant and school teacher, current owner-agent of Al Graf Bail Bonds. This friendly and cheerful Japanese-American woman had entered the business because her husband, a retired police officer now deceased, had suffered from back problems. A desk job being practical under such circumstances, they bought the business from Al.

| 149 |

In churches one sees altars, in low-class jungle whorehouses one finds girlie posters taped to the bamboo walls, and in bail-bonds establishments one discovers emblems of conformity with legal authority. Al Graf’s, for instance, sported the insigniae of the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association, the National Rifle Association, and even the American Gunsmiths’ Association, a worthy organization whose skills remain of use to shooters of all ethical persuasions. At Al Graf’s there stretched a glasstopped wooden counter with a couple of stools behind it where the bondsmen sat. This barrier reminded me of the discreet little walls and reefs in topless clubs, cliffs to keep excited clients away. Every bondsman I’ve ever talked to says that the customers are friendly beyond the point of regularity; but aren’t we allowed to imagine odd times when some ghost without collateral blows in, and, his demands unsatisfied, decides to haunt the place? They say that Leon Padilla, the Sacramento “bail bonds king,” has survived four murder attempts — but some or all of those might have come from rival bondsmen. Didn’t anybody at Al Graf’s keep a box of silver bullets behind that counter, just in case? — Mrs. Campana was so kind to me that I thought her capable of exorcising all monsters with her sweetness. (Actually, they’re all very nice, she said. Each defendant is very grateful. We get along very well on the street.) And Roger Adair said: We have a good idea what they’re about. If we have a bad feeling, we’ll just say we’re sorry, we’re unable to write this bond for you. There are plenty of other bondsmen in the phone book. They might give you a little huff and grief about not wanting to help ’em but that’s just a part of the business. It is very natural in life to want to make a profit, be it financial or otherwise — don’t honeybees profit when they build up a store of metabolized nectar? When one profits from other people’s desperation (which I as a journalist occasionally do), one may well be lubricating evil’s tracks. — But must that be? Why should Mrs. Campana put herself at financial risk for the sake of every accused stranger’s freedom? Doesn’t she deserve to flourish? Aren’t her customers pleased to escape or postpone their living death?

Do you ever feel that bail costs too much? I asked her.

Some families, she replied, well, they go overboard, which I think is wrong. They offer up what they can’t afford. We don’t wanna go after them for the money. If the guy skips, they would be hurt just as hard as we would be. We’re here to protect their interest as the indemnitor. So anybody who skips, we try to coax them back into the system. We take the friendly approach. I’ll call them and they’ll be like, oh, my God, I’ve blown it. What do I do now?

(And Roger Adair said: Maybe five or ten percent are knuckleheads at most. People call and say, whoops, my car broke down. Yeah, right. And most of the skips, we get ’em cleared up before anything bad happens. Only two to three percent actually run, and we have our own bounty hunter.)

When we take ‘em out of jail, said Al Graf, ninety-eight percent show up for trial. (Al, as his business card said, was the original “BONDSMAN WITH A HEART” and on that lemon-yellow card his telephone number had been inscribed in a ruby red heart.)

Mrs. Campana explicated: If they do not show up, they come back and request to get back on the calendar. We’ve collateralized their bail, so…

| 150 |

I asked Matt Gonzalez: Would you say that bail bondsmen perform a service or would you call them vultures?

I would think more on the service side.* However, what’s their risk?

Well, Al Graf told me that ninety-eight percent of his clients don’t skip.

He would know. In that case, maybe ten percent is a little steep.

Reader, I repeat: How can one not wish upon every bail bondsman, as upon every other soul, riches? (I keep seeing more and more new bail bonds businesses across from the courthouse, said the bail commissioner. I have never seen one fail.) But I would prefer it if their services were more democratically bestowed. As I write this, I can see before me Strawberry’s sad and drunken face.

| 151 |

The public defender Daro Inouye told me that ninety-four percent of his clients were incarcerated simply because they could not make bail. When I first heard this, I couldn’t believe it.* I would have believed ten percent, or even thirty, but not almost all of them. Inouye went on to say that in the old days far more people were bailed. I asked what had happened. — This is one of the great mysteries, he laughed, spreading his arms.

But it’s far more expensive to incarcerate them all! I said.

Absolutely. Absolutely. But pretrial detention just points out the difference between rich and poor. And look. If you have x amount of people in the county jail, so the county gets sued by the feds for overcrowding, what’s going to happen? A new jail! The greatest thing in this state used to be the California higher education master plan. Three years ago, the amount we spent on education was for the first time surpassed by the amount spent on prisons. You build a prison, you have to fill it or they close you down… If I were a wealthy man, I’d invest in geriatrics. The biggest old-age facilities will be in prisons. The whole concept is fear. Build a prison and they will come.

I thought for a while, then said: Why not create a state fund to pay for the supervision of poor people who can’t bail? Pay for ankle bracelets or bounty hunters or something. That’s got to be cheaper and kinder than letting them sit in jail.

Lemme tell you, said Inouye a little vaguely. This has been tossed around in many jurisdictions as an adjunct to the O.R. And we do have an O.R. Project in San Francisco…

Why don’t defendants get O.R.’d more often, aside from the financial incentive to fill prisons?

Well, a judge might hesitate to O.R. a suspect because if he committed any crimes while he was out, the judge’s enemies would have ammunition against him in his next reelection campaign. Moreover, bondsmen sometimes support judges in their election campaigns. — He chuckled and then said: A judge who O.R.s people who’d otherwise be paying bail bondsmen might be less than popular!

| 152 |

Needless to say, the bondsmen express divergent views. Roger Adair, for instance, said: Your idea of a fund sounds nice in principle, but when it came out to the time and money actually needed, I don’t think it would be there.

I knew that Adair was right, because it’s not so popular to spend money on poor people.

And lemme tell you something about the skip rate on O.R., he went on. To be honest with you, they’ve got over ninety-five thousand active bench warrants in Sacramento city and county. Only three hundred and forty-two of those are for people out on bail.†

That’s why I don’t recommend any kind of O.R. program. What’s more, we bail bondsmen with our own bounty hunters do go out and find our own people at our expense, so we save the taxpayers’ money.

| 153 |

If you extrapolate that out, laughed Daro in response, leaning back in the dark at the Inn Justice bar, his white shirt perfect against his white hair and handsome, florid face, well, that means those people never got in trouble again, since the system hasn’t found them, right? So they haven’t had an encounter with the law for seven years! So O.R. works! he chuckled. That statistic means we should shut down the prison system!

| 154 |

In Sacramento there is no bail commissioner at all, and in San Francisco the sherriff’s office had never heard of round-bespectacled, dark-moustached Commissioner Lam, who on an average day played God thirty-five times, all aside from his job presiding over drug court. I called superior court, where the clerks asked one another in bafflement: Would you know how to reach the bail commissioner? — Finally they referred me to the Office of Citizens’ Complaints, because “they know everything.” But they didn’t. In the end, Daro Inouye helped me interview him at the Inn Justice.

Would you say you’re more on the public defender’s side or the D.A.’s side?

Oh, I think I piss off both sides, he said.

How fair would you say the bail system is in general?

I acknowledge that it’s an unfair system, but I’m not sure that there’s anything better.

And O.R.? I asked him, because he reviewed all candidates for that avenue to liberty.

My feeling on O.R.? he said slowly. If you’re a person who has a stake in this, you’re gonna have to come back to the courthouse. The others, they don’t give a crap. They may commit the same offense again, sure. We case manage these guys. What else can we do? The fifteen minutes that somebody spends in court is nothing compared to the twenty-four hours he spends in the street. How important can the guy in the black robe be compared to the asshole who keeps chasin’ him in the Tenderloin?

(Failure is a part of the whole cycle, Daro agreed. Otherwise you’re saying, you blew it, that’s it forever, you’re in jail.)

How do you choose who stays and who goes?

I look at the background to see if the person will come back and if he is a particular threat. Has he defaulted before? The first issue is community safety. Then comes the severity of the offense. Finally comes failure to appear. This has nothing to do with has he committed the crime or not, and so I don’t think it gets in the way of presumption of innocence.

When I’d asked Geri Campana how she decided whom to bail, she’d replied: A lot of it is gut feeling. I can pick up the phone and know right away if it’s a good bail or a bad bail. And then a lot of it is the stability of them in the area — how long they work here, how many family members are in my office signing up for them, whether the family’s stable and the defendant has never failed to appear.

So far, this sounded pretty much like Commissioner Lam’s answer. But then I inquired: What’s a bad bail? Somebody who’s going to skip?

Mrs. Campana’s answer went to the heart of the matter: If we take good collateral, we don’t worry about that.

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And so, should the collateral be safe and decent, our bondsman crosses the street, ascends those wide steps of the Hall of Justice, and makes a beeline for Room 201 to submit the double-stubbed bond papers (which come preprinted in varying ceiling amounts, just like travelers’ checks) through a circular opening, receiving a receipt in exchange, which at least is more than can be said for many other transactions involving criminality. Next, the bondsman must follow the arrow for the JAIL ELEVATOR. Ascend to the place of confinement, and you’ll find yourself within a narrow cage whose far wall contains a little window, the counterpart of the orifice in Room 201, where the bond is actually posted, words between bondsman and clerk crackling tinnily back and forth through the barrier, as if one of them were a prisoner and the other a visitor — but which is which? The atmosphere of the cage is sadness. Sorrow’s reek wafts in from the cells beyond. But it’s all to the good. No more than six hours after the bond has been posted, and usually sooner, the jailbird will fly free.

Meanwhile, the next defendant is already slowly and sneeringly approaching the judge with a rolling gait, his hands in his pocket. He ignores the jingling of the bailiff’s keys. Ladies bustle back and forth with armloads of files. And his predecessor, the hangdog defendant, looks down as the bailiff unlocks the door to stage left, sending him back to limbo.

Any call that we get, we do anything and everything in our power to help them get out, said Roger Adair. But you can only go so far. You can’t pull a rabbit out of a hat. And if they just can’t work with you, you tell ’em you’re sorry, maybe they can get their bail reduced or plead out on their case or just get it taken it care of. But we do go to great lengths.

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Mr. Adair had already admitted that he did not go to great lengths for defendants such as Strawberry, whose famous line I’ll be right back brought smiles to all the grizzled old drinkers’ faces as the new trick commenced his wait. Strawberry was off smoking crack, getting drunk, and engaging in other contract work. She might be back in an hour, or then again it might be a week. We’ve already agreed that her example remains, to use her own summation, irrelevant, the law having long since damned her beyond reach of any bail. — They take me and lock me up, she had fatalistically said. — But set that aside; one last time, let’s suppose her to be one of those near-virginal trick-turners still eligible for bail — in other words, not a parole violator but a doer of a shining misdemeanors. Now, in the bad old days of misdemeanors, a prostitute could expect to face five hundred dollars bail, which at ten percent to the bail bondsman (not Mr. Adair, obviously, but perhaps somebody akin to that tightly grinning fellow up in Spokane who accepted VCRs) required her to turn two extra tricks.* And, by the way, here’s an interesting axiom I heard at the public defender’s office: Only two kinds of defendants fight a misdemeanor charge: middle- class people, who have the time and money to be outraged, and crazy people. The others just plead guilty.* Nowadays, assuming that unlike Strawberry she didn’t have other outstanding warrants, or wasn’t violating parole by getting picked up, she could simply be O.R.’d.

Some bondsmen must not have liked that development, I remarked.

It did take away their bread and butter, the Commissioner laughed.

So more misdemeanors get cited out, but—

But meanwhile, there’s an increase in the jail population in this state due to the increase in wobbler charges. The bail people have failed to understand that almost all street activity is now criminalized. They want a piece of that, but they don’t understand that these street folks don’t have any money.

A HYPOTHETICAL “WOBBLER” CASE

Suppose that a man strikes his wife, who calls the police.

Penal Code 273.5 (misdemeanor) Corporal injury by spouse of person cohabitating

BAIL: $2,500 (1997-98)

BAIL: $5,000 (1998-99)

or

Penal Code 273.5 (felony) Corporal injury by spouse of person cohabitating

BAIL: $10,000 (1997-98)

BAIL: $25,000 (1998-99)

In effect, wobblers allow the court to choose between making bail just barely affordable (or not) for hard-pressed defendants, or else utterly beyond reach. In the hands of wise magistrates, such discretion must be beneficial. In careless or brutal hands, it enables abuse. — Penal code 11337, Lam was saying, is possession of a controlled substance. It can be either a felony or a misdemeanor. But in many jurisdictions, the D.A. will automatically file a felony every time.

That fact told more about the D.A.s in those jurisdictions than about the defendants, and it made me sad. I remembered reading about the Greek lawgiver Solon, who supposedly made death the punishment for every crime. When they asked him why, he said: For the lesser crimes, death is deserved, and I have no greater penalty left for the greater crimes. In the prosecution of such wobbler crimes I seemed to see (on a lesser scale, to be sure) the same sort of ruthlessly inflexible punitiveness.

It may be that too much discretion and too little are equivalent judicial evils. Perhaps gloomy disgust is the inevitable byproduct of any human attempt to quantify justice. Bail! How strange, bitter, and slippery it is!

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I mean, where are our priorities here? said Commissioner Lam. This one defendant, all we did was give her a set of teeth and she started smiling. These people don’t wanna be out here smelling like they do. What we do at drug court is teach. I release him; he’s high; and he’s gonna get high again. You wanna plant that seed for next time and next time. I say to them, you’re taking that jailhouse with you everywhere you go until you give up that jailhouse.

Would you favor O.R. over bail, or vice versa?

I do not have a big isssue against O.R. or against bail. Both of them have a place. But one thing I will say. When you bail somebody, you can just bail them. But when you O.R. somebody, you can attach conditions like they have to attend a drug program. And one other thing I want to say: At least eighty percent of my O.R.s do show up in court.

Well, can you suggest any improvement to the way things are now?

What I dream of is a pretrial triage system, he said. I want a pre-arraignment multi-service center. Wouldn’t it be great if somebody was there to say: This guy’s issue is mental illness so let’s treat him for that, this guy’s issue is drug abuse so let’s put him in rehab, this guy’s issue is he’s just a bad actor? So many defendants would be better served in another arena than the criminal justice system. But it’ll never happen.

And I closed my eyes, and saw still another handsclasping defendant sitting with his legs braced apart on the floor of the public defender’s office and his bearded head sunken in sadness.