Bail

The Forgotten Constituency: How the Anti-Surety Movement Left Victims Behind

When accountability disappears from the criminal justice system, victims pay the price — and the organizations responsible have never once answered for it.

There is a constituency in the American criminal justice debate that is rarely invited to the table, seldom mentioned in the press releases of well-funded reform organizations, and almost never considered when billion-dollar foundations design the policies they intend to impose on communities across this country. That constituency is not the defendant. It is not the advocacy organization. It is not the academic researcher producing studies from the comfort of a university office far removed from the consequences of the policies they recommend. The forgotten constituency is the victim of crime — the individual, the family, the community that trusted the American justice system to deliver accountability, to enforce its own orders, and to ensure that the person who caused their suffering would face the full weight of the law rather than walk out of a courthouse and disappear into a system that no longer had the tools, the will, or the structure to bring them back.

For decades, a coordinated network of organizations, foundations, and legal advocacy groups has waged a sustained campaign against the professional surety bail system in the United States — a system that, for more than two hundred years, has served as one of the most effective, accountable, and self-financing mechanisms for ensuring that defendants appear in court, that victims receive their day in justice, and that the judicial system functions with the discipline and respect that a free society requires. That campaign has been well-funded, strategically executed, and almost entirely silent on the one question that should have been asked first, loudest, and most insistently throughout the entire debate: What happens to the victim when the defendant does not show up?

The Organizations Behind the Movement

The Anti-Surety Movement is not a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens. It is a coordinated, heavily financed network of organizations that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over multiple decades working to dismantle the professional surety bail system and replace it with government-managed release programs, algorithmic risk assessments, and unsecured release policies that remove financial accountability from the pretrial process entirely. Understanding who these organizations are, what they have funded, and what they have consistently refused to address is essential to understanding why victims have been so thoroughly and deliberately left out of this conversation.

The Vera Institute of Justice, founded in 1961, has been at the forefront of the movement to eliminate money bail in the United States for more than sixty years, openly stating on its own website that it is “committed to pretrial justice by ending money bail” and calling for the elimination of what it describes as the “profit-making bail bond industry.” The Vera Institute frames its entire argument around racial and economic equity — a framing that, while not without some legitimate underlying concerns, deliberately avoids any serious engagement with the question of what happens to court appearance rates, public safety, and victim protection when the financial accountability structure of the pretrial system is removed. The Vera Institute has never published a study centered on the impact of rising failure to appear rates on crime victims. It has never produced a report examining how defendants released without accountability went on to reoffend against new victims before their original cases were resolved. That silence is not an oversight. It is a choice that reflects the organization’s priorities — and victims are not among them.

The Laura and John Arnold Foundation, now operating as Arnold Ventures, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding bail reform efforts across the United States, developing and distributing a risk assessment algorithm known as the Public Safety Assessment that was marketed to jurisdictions as a scientific, objective replacement for the financial accountability of the surety bail system. The Arnold Foundation funded lawsuits to eliminate bail, partnered with local jurisdictions to dismantle secured release requirements, and added more than two hundred jurisdictions to what it called the Safety and Justice Challenge — a national initiative designed to reduce jail populations by releasing defendants who previously would have been held on surety bonds. What the Arnold Foundation did not fund, in any documented or publicly available form, was a serious, sustained examination of what happened to the victims of the defendants it helped release — the people who were harmed, threatened, intimidated, or killed by individuals who were back on the streets because the accountability structure that would have kept them there had been deliberately removed.

The MacArthur Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the United States, has been one of the primary financial engines behind the national bail reform movement, funding the Safety and Justice Challenge alongside Arnold Ventures and providing grants to dozens of organizations working to eliminate secured bail across the country. In Charlotte, North Carolina, MacArthur Foundation and Arnold Ventures-funded policies contributed to the release of Decarlos Brown — a career criminal with fourteen prior arrests, multiple failure to appear charges, and a prior armed robbery conviction — without bond or monitoring. Brown subsequently murdered Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, on the city’s transit system. The MacArthur Foundation has never publicly addressed what its policies contributed to that outcome. It has never acknowledged the victim. It has never reconsidered its funding priorities in light of the documented human cost of the policies it championed.

The Bail Project, which operates as a national revolving bail fund posting bail for defendants across the country, has built its entire organizational identity around the narrative that the bail system is a tool of oppression rather than a mechanism of accountability, and has posted bail for thousands of defendants — including, in documented cases, individuals who went on to commit serious crimes against new victims after being released. The Bail Project does not publish comprehensive data on the outcomes of the defendants it releases. It does not report on failure to appear rates. It does not report on reoffense rates. It does not report on the impact its releases have had on the victims of subsequent crimes committed by individuals it bailed out. What it does publish are fundraising appeals, policy advocacy documents, and carefully selected success stories that present a deliberately incomplete picture of what its operations produce in the real world.

The Brennan Center for Justice, whose principal sponsor is the MacArthur Foundation, has produced a steady stream of research and policy advocacy in support of bail reform, framing the surety system as a wealth-based detention mechanism while largely ignoring the documented consequences of the accountability vacuum that reform policies have created. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which reported revenues of $129 million in 2024 and an endowment approaching nearly one billion dollars, has filed lawsuits in Mississippi and across the South specifically targeting the surety bail system — successfully eliminating money bail in the cities of Corinth and Meridian, Mississippi, through litigation and settlement agreements, and confirming through its own documentation that it has challenged wealth-based detention practices in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas. The SPLC, an organization that now faces a federal indictment on charges of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering related to its informant program, pursued the elimination of surety bail in Mississippi communities while those same communities had no voice in the policy outcomes that followed. The victims of crimes committed by defendants who were released without accountability in those jurisdictions have never received acknowledgment, analysis, or apology from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

What the Data Shows — and Who It Ignores

The most devastating indictment of the Anti-Surety Movement is not ideological. It is empirical. The documented, peer-reviewed, publicly available data on what happens when financial accountability is removed from the pretrial system tells a story that these organizations have spent enormous resources attempting to obscure, dismiss, and reframe — because the story the data tells is a story about victims, and victims are not a constituency these organizations have chosen to serve.

Yolo County, California District Attorney Jeff Reisig — a prosecutor who has implemented progressive policies in his own jurisdiction, including race-blind charging that became state law — published two landmark studies on the real-world consequences of zero bail policies that constitute some of the most rigorous, documented evidence available on the impact of bail reform on public safety and court accountability. The first study, published in August 2022, examined 595 individuals released on zero bail in Yolo County over a thirteen-month period and found that 420 of them — 70.6 percent — were rearrested, and that 123 of those individuals, representing 20 percent of everyone released, were arrested for crimes of violence including murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, robbery, carjacking, and domestic violence. The Vera Institute dismissed these findings. The Arnold Foundation did not address them. The Bail Project did not acknowledge them. Behind every one of those 420 rearrests was a new victim — a person who was harmed because a defendant who should have been held accountable was instead released into a system that had been deliberately stripped of the tools necessary to ensure their return.

The second Yolo County study, completed in February 2023, addressed the methodological criticisms of the first by establishing a control group — comparing recidivism rates between defendants who posted surety bail and defendants released on zero bail over an eighteen-month period. The results were, in the words of District Attorney Reisig himself, frightening. Defendants released on zero bail committed 163 percent more total crime and 200 percent more violent crime than defendants who had posted bail. Zero bail defendants were re-arrested on average after 129 days, compared to 185 days for those who had posted bail — meaning that not only did they reoffend more frequently and more violently, they did so faster, producing new victims at a rate that the surety system would have dramatically reduced. “We have more people being shot at, stabbed, assaulted, robbed, beaten,” Reisig stated. “These are real victims — and the numbers are staggering under zero bail.” The Anti-Surety Movement organizations had no meaningful response to these findings, because a meaningful response would have required them to acknowledge what they had spent decades refusing to acknowledge — that their policies have victims, and those victims deserve to be counted.

In New Jersey, after the elimination of cash bail in 2017, failure to appear rates increased and the state was forced to repeatedly revisit its reform framework as the operational consequences of removing financial accountability became impossible to ignore. In Illinois, the SAFE-T Act of 2023, which abolished cash bail statewide and represented the most aggressive bail reform legislation in American history, produced reports of rising failure to appear rates from prosecutors even before full implementation was complete. In Alaska, after similar reform legislation passed, researchers found that releasing offenders without accountability led to increased crime and court non-appearance, and documented specifically that victim rights were not being enforced because offenders were not adhering to their release requirements. In every jurisdiction where the financial accountability structure of the surety bail system was significantly weakened or eliminated, the same pattern emerged — defendants appeared less reliably, courts struggled to enforce their own orders, and the victims waiting for resolution of their cases were left in an extended limbo of uncertainty, fear, and institutional failure.

The Collapse of Judicial Respect

There is a dimension of this crisis that the reform organizations have never engaged with seriously, because engaging with it would require them to acknowledge a consequence of their policies that extends far beyond individual cases and individual victims — the systematic erosion of respect for the judicial system itself, in the communities that depend on it most.

When a defendant fails to appear in court, the immediate consequence is visible and documented — a bench warrant is issued, a docket stalls, a victim’s case is delayed. But the longer-term consequence is something that does not appear in a research study and cannot be captured in a failure to appear rate — it is the gradual destruction of the belief, held by victims, families, witnesses, law enforcement officers, and ordinary citizens, that the justice system means what it says, enforces what it orders, and treats the rights of victims with the same seriousness it extends to the rights of defendants. When courts cannot bring defendants back, when warrants go unserved, when cases collapse because witnesses have moved on, when victims give up on a process that has demonstrated its inability to deliver accountability, something fundamental is lost that statistics cannot fully measure and that no bail reform advocacy document has ever seriously attempted to address.

The Anti-Surety Movement has spent decades arguing that the commercial bail system diminishes respect for the judiciary by allowing wealth to determine pretrial freedom — an argument that contains a legitimate concern about economic equity that deserves to be addressed through targeted reform rather than wholesale elimination. But what these organizations have never acknowledged is that nothing diminishes respect for the judiciary more thoroughly, more permanently, and more devastatingly than a court system that cannot enforce its own orders, cannot compel defendants to appear, and cannot deliver the accountability that victims were promised when they had the courage to report a crime, cooperate with law enforcement, and trust a system that subsequently failed them. Accountability is not a word that the Anti-Surety Movement uses comfortably, because accountability is the one value that their preferred policies consistently and demonstrably undermine.

The professional surety bail system is not a perfect institution. No human institution is. But what it provides — financial accountability, professional oversight, licensed agents with a personal stake in ensuring court appearance, and a self-financing enforcement mechanism that costs taxpayers nothing — is precisely the kind of structural accountability that the Founders understood was necessary in a system designed for imperfect human beings. When that structure is weakened, the courts weaken with it, and the first people to feel that weakness are not the defendants whose interests the reform organizations claim to champion — they are the victims whose interests these organizations have never championed at all.

The Profession That Stayed

While the Vera Institute published policy papers and the Arnold Foundation distributed algorithms and the SPLC filed lawsuits against Mississippi cities, licensed bail agents across this country were doing what they have always done — showing up, doing the work, and ensuring that defendants appeared in court so that victims could receive their day in justice. It is not coincidental that the profession most committed to court appearance accountability is also the profession that the Anti-Surety Movement has worked hardest to eliminate, because a system built on accountability is the most direct possible refutation of everything these organizations claim their reforms will achieve.

The Professional Bail Agents of the United States — PBUS — represents the national voice of a profession that has operated at the intersection of public safety, judicial accountability, and victim protection for more than two centuries, and that has spent recent years engaged in the kind of disciplined, documented, results-oriented advocacy that the reform organizations, with their billion-dollar endowments and their foundation grants, have conspicuously failed to produce. In Mississippi, the Mississippi Bail Agents Association has built a twenty-year record of professional contribution to the state’s judicial infrastructure — developing and revising a Bail Procedures Manual that has been adopted by the Mississippi Judicial College as recognized continuing education material, presenting to sheriffs, judges, court clerks, and elected officials across the state, and collaborating with Circuit Court Judge Brad Touchstone to produce the first-ever Uniform Clerk and Sheriff Procedures for Bond Forfeiture and Revocation in the Fifteenth Circuit Court District — a document that produced a dramatic reduction in failure to appear rates and 161 documented bond surrenders in eight months, with the goal of adoption by the Mississippi Supreme Court as a statewide template.

These are not the results of organizations with nine-figure endowments and national media relationships. These are the results of licensed professionals who understood that their one assignment — have the client in court, or return them to jail — was also, at its core, a commitment to the victim waiting in that courtroom for resolution, accountability, and justice.

The Question That Has Never Been Answered

The Anti-Surety Movement has produced thousands of pages of research, dozens of lawsuits, hundreds of millions of dollars in foundation grants, and a coordinated national media campaign built around the narrative that the commercial bail system is an instrument of injustice that must be eliminated in the name of equity and fairness. What it has never produced — in any document, in any study, in any public statement from any of its member organizations — is a serious, sustained, intellectually honest engagement with the question that victims have been asking since the first bail reform law was passed and the first defendant walked out of a courthouse and never came back.

What about us?

What about the victim whose case was delayed for two years because the defendant failed to appear and the court lacked the tools to bring him back? What about the family whose loved one was murdered by a defendant released without accountability under a reform policy funded by a foundation that has never acknowledged their loss? What about the witness who was intimidated into silence because a defendant who should have been held accountable was instead walking the same streets as the people he had already harmed? What about the communities — many of them the low-income communities of color that the reform organizations claim to be protecting — that have watched their trust in the judicial system erode as courts have demonstrated an inability to enforce their own orders and deliver the accountability that justice requires?

The surety bail profession does not claim to be a perfect system. It claims to be an accountable one — and in a justice system built for imperfect human beings operating in imperfect conditions, accountability is not a luxury or a political position. It is the foundation on which everything else rests. When that foundation is weakened, the courts suffer, the communities suffer, and the victims suffer most of all.

The Anti-Surety Movement chose its constituency a long time ago. It was not the victim. It was not the family. It was not the community waiting for a justice system that meant what it said and enforced what it ordered.

The surety bail profession made a different choice. It made that choice every day, in every courthouse, in every jurisdiction where a licensed bail agent stood behind a bond and accepted personal accountability for ensuring that defendants answered for their actions and that victims received the justice they were promised.

That is what accountability looks like. That is what the Anti-Surety Movement has spent decades trying to eliminate. And that is why this fight is not over.

About the Author

About the Author Mike Morrison is the 2026 PBUS National Bail Agent of the Year and President of the Mississippi Bail Agents Association. With more than 35 years of hands-on experience as a licensed bail agent and owner of Mike Morrison Bail Bonding Company in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, he brings real-world insight to America’s most important conversations on criminal justice, pretrial policy, public safety, and good governance.

Morrison writes and speaks from the front lines — courtrooms, jails, and communities — rather than from theory. His commentary on policy, taxes, justice reform, and the daily realities facing working Americans has earned more than one million views across social media in 2026 alone. He regularly presents on bail policy and professional standards at the Mississippi Judicial College and leads ethics and training programs for bail professionals nationwide.

Independent, plain-spoken, and grounded in practical experience, Mike is committed to clear-eyed analysis that cuts through political noise — whether the topic is public safety, government accountability, or the true cost of policy decisions on Mississippi families and the nation.