Who Pays When the Bondsman Is Gone? The Cost-Shift Nobody Talks About

Reform advocates routinely cite a single, powerful number: pretrial detention costs United States taxpayers approximately $14 billion per year. Reduce the number of people held pretrial, the argument goes, and reduce that cost. This is true as far as it goes. Pretrial detention is expensive, and the population held in it is overwhelmingly legally innocent.

But the argument almost never accounts for the cost of the replacement system.

The standard reform fiscal pitch compares jail beds before reform to jail beds after reform. It does not compare the full pretrial system before reform — privately-capitalized commercial surety, with operating costs absorbed by premium revenue and risk pricing — to the full pretrial system after reform: government-staffed pretrial services agencies, electronic monitoring contracts, expanded judicial calendars, and the ongoing administrative apparatus of risk-based release.

That replacement system is not free. It is not even cheap. And every dollar it costs is a dollar that comes out of a public budget that, before reform, did not have to carry it.

What Pretrial Services Actually Cost

The Washington State Auditor's Office conducted a 2017 audit of pretrial services in five Washington counties. The audit found per-defendant supervision costs ranging from $1.80 to $7.26 per day, depending on program design and caseload, against an average jail cost of approximately $100 per inmate per day. The audit recommended expanded use of pretrial services on the basis that it was cheaper than jail. That comparison is correct. It is also incomplete.

Pretrial services cost $1.80 to $7.26 per defendant per day. Surety bail costs the public $0.00 per defendant per day. The defendant and any cosigners pay the bondsman a premium — typically 10% of the bond amount, set by state law. The state, county, and municipal budgets carry no line item for the supervisory function the surety performs.

Now multiply. A jurisdiction processing 50,000 defendants annually who would previously have been released on surety, now released to pretrial services at $5 per day for an average pretrial period of 90 days, generates $22.5 million per year in new public-budget cost — a cost that, under the prior system, the public budget did not bear at all.

New Jersey: The Unfunded Mandate Lawsuit

When New Jersey's Criminal Justice Reform Act took effect on January 1, 2017, the New Jersey Association of Counties (NJAC) sued the State on the grounds that the law constituted an unfunded mandate. The counties argued that they would be required to expand local pretrial services and judicial calendaring without a corresponding funding source — and that those costs would necessarily be passed along to property taxpayers.

The counties lost — but on a technical exemption argument related to the constitutional amendment that authorized the reform, not on the merits of the cost claim. The Council was not asked to rule on whether the costs were real. They were, and they are.

Eight years on, the system continues to require legislative review. In 2024, the Acting Director of the Administrative Office of the Courts, Judge Glenn Grant, gave New Jersey's bail reform program a "B-minus" grade in Senate testimony. Both major candidates in the 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial race — Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli — campaigned on revisions to the post-reform pretrial system.

Illinois: $51.8 Million and 176 New Positions

Illinois provides the cleanest contemporary case study. When the SAFE-T Act's Pretrial Fairness Act took effect on September 18, 2023, the Illinois Supreme Court's FY2023 budget request grew by $51.8 million, or 10.5%, over the prior year — driven principally by the creation of the new Office of Statewide Pretrial Services (OSPS). OSPS alone required a $26 million budget increase and 165 new staff positions to provide pretrial services across the 71 Illinois counties that had no prior pretrial services agency. Total Illinois Supreme Court headcount grew by 176 positions in a single fiscal year.

Before the SAFE-T Act, much of that population was released on commercial surety, supervised by privately-funded bonding companies, with recapture costs borne by the surety upon any failure to appear. After the SAFE-T Act, the same supervisory function — performed less rigorously, without recapture authority, and without financial accountability for skips — is paid for by Illinois taxpayers.

That is not a fiscal saving. That is a transfer.

What Surety Costs the Public

A commercial surety bond costs the public budget $0.00. Not approximately zero. Zero.

The bondsman pays state licensing fees. The surety insurer pays state insurance premium taxes. The agent's revenue, the insurer's margin, and the operational overhead of skip tracing and recapture are funded entirely from defendant-paid premiums. Forfeitures, when they occur, are paid by the surety to the court — generating revenue for the public, rather than expense.

This is, by any honest measure, an unusual fiscal arrangement. A privately-capitalized network of small businesses provides a court-supervisory function, a flight-deterrent function, and a recapture function, in 46 states, for tens of billions of dollars in aggregate face value of bonds, at no direct cost to any taxpayer in any jurisdiction.

The reform argument is that this arrangement is unjust because it imposes costs on defendants and their families. That is a moral argument — one the bail profession is willing to engage on the merits. What it is not, despite a decade of advocacy framing, is a fiscal argument. Replacing the private surety system with a publicly-funded pretrial services system does not save money. It moves the bill.

Honest Accounting

The reform fiscal case asks the public to evaluate one cost (jail-bed reductions) without evaluating the offsetting cost (pretrial services agency expansion, staffing, monitoring contracts, judicial calendaring, court technology, and unfunded county-level burdens). That is not accounting. It is selective bookkeeping.

A complete fiscal analysis of bail reform would include the following line items on the cost side — each of which is currently borne, in part or in whole, by surety insurers and bondsmen at no public expense:

• Pretrial supervision ($1.80 to $7.26 per defendant per day in audited Washington programs)
• Skip-tracing and warrant service costs absorbed by police agencies post-reform
• Court rescheduling costs from increased failures to appear
• Electronic monitoring contracts (typically $5 to $15 per day per defendant)
• Pretrial services agency staffing growth (Illinois: 176 new positions in a single fiscal year)
• Capital expenditures for facility expansion and information technology
• Litigation costs from unfunded-mandate challenges

When that accounting is done in full, the savings narrative does not survive contact with the numbers. The fiscal effect of bail reform is not a reduction in pretrial cost. It is a transfer of pretrial cost — from the private balance sheets of surety insurers and bonding companies, and the premiums paid by defendants who use the system, to the general funds paid by taxpayers who do not.

Whether that transfer is justified on policy grounds is a fair question. Whether it constitutes fiscal savings is not. It does not.

---

Sources

• Washington State Auditor's Office, Reforming Bail Practices in Washington (2017).
• Pretrial Justice Institute, Pretrial Justice: How Much Does It Cost? (2017).
• Council on Local Mandates, State of New Jersey, New Jersey Association of Counties v. State of New Jersey (2017).
• New Jersey Administrative Office of the Courts, Senate appropriations testimony of Acting Director Judge Glenn Grant (March 2024).
• Civic Federation, Illinois Criminal Justice Agency Budget Requests for FY2023 Reflect Implementation of SAFE-T Act (March 2022).
• Maryland Governor's Commission to Reform Maryland's Pretrial System, Final Report (December 19, 2014).