News
Updates from the National Association of Bail Agents
Opinion
The Fix Is In: How a California Court Ruling Is Being Used to Dismantle the Bail System — And What Utah's Experience Tells Us About What Comes Next
A unanimous California Supreme Court ruling in In re Kowalczyk narrows when bail can be denied and requires ability-to-pay assessments — reopening a pipeline into government-supervised pretrial release that Utah's own court records show operating with no financial accountability when defendants fail to appear.
NABA Staff Writer·Aug 6, 2026
Opinion
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.
NABA Staff Writer·Apr 21, 2026