News
Updates from the National Association of Bail Agents
They Can't Win the Argument, So They're Changing the Dictionary
From redefining "bail" as any form of release to rebranding licensed bail agents an "industry," the movement to eliminate commercial bail has spent thirty years rewriting the vocabulary of pretrial justice — and courts are starting to adopt the new definitions.
Beyond the Statewide Average: What Illinois’s County-Level Data Actually Shows About the SAFE-T Act
The Illinois SAFE-T Act's favorable headline numbers rest on Cook County data — a jurisdiction that had already moved away from cash bail six years before the law. Counties that actually relied on cash bail tell a different story: rising re-offense rates, exploding FTA summons volume, and declining victim restitution.
The SAFE-T Act at Two Years: What the Data Says, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters
Illinois’s SAFE-T Act did not produce the catastrophe critics predicted. It also has not produced the unalloyed success proponents claim. Two years of partial, mixed data — and one major missing comparison.
Who Pays When the Bondsman Is Gone? The Cost-Shift Nobody Talks About
Bail reform's fiscal argument compares jail beds before reform to jail beds after. It almost never accounts for the cost of the replacement system — government-staffed pretrial agencies, electronic monitoring contracts, and expanded judicial calendars. That system is not free. It is not even cheap.