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# The Anti-Surety Movement
- URL: https://mike-morrison-public-safety-and-accountability.ghost.io/the-anti-surety-movement/
- Published: 2026-08-23T17:03:41.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-23T17:05:49.000Z
- Author: Michael D. Morrison
- Tags: Mike Morrison Bail Bonding, Arrest, Bail, Bail Agents, Bail Bonds, Bail Enforcement, Bail Professional, Bail Recovery, Bail Reform, BEA, Bounty Hunter, constitutional bail rights, court accountability, Court System, Criminal Justice, failure to appear, Government Accountability,, News, pretrial release, prosecution, Public Safety, victims rights

***Who They Are, Who Funds Them, and What Happens When Their Promises Meet the Results***

# Introduction

The "Anti-Surety Movement" is a national network of advocacy organizations, litigation groups, private foundations, government agencies, and nonprofit bail funds that has spent decades, and an enormous amount of money, building the case that commercial surety bail should be reduced, replaced, or eliminated. That campaign has rarely had to answer three basic questions: Who is behind it? Who pays for it? And when its preferred alternatives have actually been tried, did they work?

This paper answers those three questions in five parts, followed by a conclusion. Part One defines the Anti-Surety Movement and identifies the organizations that belong in it, using their own documented positions rather than assumption. Part Two follows the private money — the foundations and donors who fund those organizations, including a close look at how that same national network operates in Mississippi. Part Three follows the government money, because a meaningful share of the infrastructure behind bail reform was built and is still funded with taxpayer dollars. Part Four applies the financial-interest standard the movement has long applied to bail agents back onto the movement itself, because advocacy against commercial bail is, for many of the people doing it, a paid profession rather than a volunteer cause. Part Five tests the movement's core promises against the outcomes recorded where its preferred policies have actually been implemented. The conclusion brings all five parts together.

An organization is named in this paper because of something specific and documented — a published policy position, a piece of litigation, a grant, a contract, a legislative campaign. It is not named because it supports criminal justice reform in some general sense, and it is not named on suspicion. Every claim here is sourced to something the organization discussed has itself published, funded, litigated, or been paid to do, and readers are invited to check every one of them against the public record.

# Part One: Who Is the Anti-Surety Movement

The "Anti-Surety Movement" is not the formal name of a single organization or an incorporated coalition. It describes a national network of advocacy organizations, litigation groups, foundations, policy organizations, nonprofit bail funds, researchers, and government-supported pretrial initiatives whose documented work seeks to reduce, replace, or eliminate commercial surety bail as a method of pretrial release.

An organization does not belong on this list because it supports some general notion of criminal justice reform. Plenty of people who support reform have no quarrel with professional bail. The defining question is narrower and more specific: do the organization's own published policies, litigation, funding decisions, or legislative advocacy seek to remove financial conditions of release, eliminate commercial bail bonds, or replace surety bail with government-administered or nonprofit alternatives? That is the test applied throughout this paper, and it is what makes the term defensible rather than rhetorical. Membership in this category can be established from an organization's own record — not from what I or anyone else assumes about its motives.

**The organizations with the clearest documented connection** include The Bail Project, whose own annual reporting states that its mission is to end cash bail and build a pretrial system in which money plays no role in freedom; Civil Rights Corps, which develops litigation and model legislation that would prohibit financial conditions of pretrial release and which directly attacks what it calls the "for-profit money-bail industry"; the Brennan Center for Justice, which publishes and promotes model legislation titled "Abolish Cash Bail," built on language developed by Civil Rights Corps, that would prohibit financial conditions of release outright; the American Civil Liberties Union, which runs national and state campaigns to end cash bail and has directly litigated against bail agents, recovery agents, and surety insurers; the Pretrial Justice Institute, which has promoted nonfinancial release, pretrial services, and a systemic move away from money-based release, and whose predecessor organization published material specifically arguing against commercial surety bail; the Justice Policy Institute, which has published extensive criticism of the commercial bail industry and advocated alternatives to for-profit bail bonding; the Southern Poverty Law Center, which lists elimination of cash bail as a stated federal legislative priority, has litigated directly against bail-bond companies, and has been an active participant in eliminating secured bail practices across the American South, including in Mississippi; the Vera Institute of Justice, which was federally funded to design and build a pretrial-release system in New Orleans intended to operate without secured financial bail and which sits inside the MacArthur Foundation's Safety and Justice Challenge network alongside the Pretrial Justice Institute; and the National Association of Pretrial Services Agencies, whose professional standards trace their development to a 1978 Department of Justice grant to NAPSA and whose current standards support the abolition of financial conditions of release.

**The organizations that finance, design, and implement the alternative systems** are just as central to this movement as the ones that litigate and lobby against bail directly — in several cases more so, since they control the money and the infrastructure the litigators and lobbyists run on. Arnold Ventures has funded pretrial reform research and developed the Public Safety Assessment, and has publicly supported systems that replace wealth-based detention with nonfinancial or risk-based decision-making. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, through its Safety and Justice Challenge, has funded jurisdictions across the country implementing pretrial assessment, pretrial services, and reductions in secured money bail. The Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center has participated in litigation attacking secured-money-bail practices in multiple states, including Mississippi and Louisiana, and has obtained settlements ending or restricting the use of financial bail. And a network of local bail funds and coalitions — the National Bail Fund Network and its member organizations, such as the Coalition to End Money Bond — campaign explicitly for the elimination of financial bail at the state and local level.

The common thread running through every organization on both tiers is not formal coordination. It is a shared objective: replacing commercial surety bail, secured financial release, or both, with recognizance release, nonprofit assistance, government pretrial services, supervision, preventive detention, or some other non-surety system. Whether these organizations sit on the same conference call is beside the point. What matters is what each one has published, litigated, funded, or lobbied for in its own name.

# Part Two: Follow the Money

The Anti-Surety Movement did not build itself. It was funded, and the funding record is public.

**Open Society Foundations**, founded by George Soros, is one of the clearest funder-to-objective relationships in this research. Open Society Institute–Baltimore's 2017 grant report identifies a $100,000 award to the Pretrial Justice Institute "to provide technical assistance, public education, communications and policy analysis to help bring about the elimination of money bail in Maryland." That is not a general operating grant to an organization that happens to work on criminal justice. It is money given for a stated purpose, and the stated purpose is eliminating money bail. Open Society Institute–Baltimore also funded the Justice Policy Institute as a partner in the Coalition for a Safe and Just Maryland, working toward the same goal in the same state.

**The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation** is one of the largest institutional funders of pretrial-system reform in the country. Its own grant database documents nine separate grants to the Pretrial Justice Institute between 2011 and 2024, totaling $16,841,000\. MacArthur states that it has awarded more than $116 million through its Safety and Justice Challenge since 2015 — a network that has involved the Pretrial Justice Institute, the Vera Institute of Justice, the Urban Institute, and Justice System Partners providing technical assistance to state and local governments moving away from secured money bail.

**The Public Welfare Foundation** has an extensive documented history of financing pretrial reform beyond litigation alone. Its FY2016 filing shows $760,000 in general support to the Pretrial Justice Institute. In 2013 alone it funded the Council of State Governments Justice Center ($450,000) to develop pretrial expertise and assist implementation of reform projects, the Crime and Justice Institute ($500,000) for technical assistance on pretrial detention reform, the Colorado Criminal Defense Institute ($100,000) for pretrial detention advocacy, the International Association of Chiefs of Police ($100,000) to build law-enforcement support for pretrial detention reform, and the Dewey Square Group ($163,000) specifically to design and execute a national communications campaign intended to help the pretrial reform field influence policymakers. That last grant matters because it shows the money reaching well beyond courtrooms and into public relations and messaging.

**Ford Foundation** has been involved in this space since the 1960s, when it financed the Manhattan Bail Project — one of the original experiments in release without traditional financial bail. That involvement continues today: Ford's grant records show a $200,000 general-support grant to Civil Rights Corps in August 2024, on top of a $240,000 commitment disclosed in its 2022 filing.

**Arnold Ventures** funds the National Partnership for Pretrial Justice, describing it as an Arnold-funded community combining research, policy development, and advocacy aimed at reforming the nation's pretrial system. Arnold also developed the Public Safety Assessment risk-assessment tool discussed in Part Five, and its current grantmaking continues to fund studies of monetary bail and bail reform in states including Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Not every Arnold-funded research project is an advocacy grant — some are genuine evaluations of competing policies — but the organization's role in building the infrastructure behind pretrial reform is well documented.

**The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative**, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, has directed extraordinary resources into FWD.us, including a publicly announced $100 million, three-year commitment. CZI's own grant database shows individual awards of $4,999,467, $1,250,000, and $9,841,988 to FWD.us for criminal justice and immigration reform work. FWD.us has in turn advocated explicitly for ending money bail — including a specific push to eliminate money bail in New York — and for policies limiting the role of insurance bonds and for-profit entities in pretrial release.

**Open Philanthropy**'s Criminal Justice Reform Project funded the creation of the National Bail Fund Network as a project of the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund. The Network's own reporting describes its goal as using community bail funds as tools within broader campaigns to end cash bail — a direct statement, in the funded organization's own words, connecting the money to the objective.

**TED's Audacious Project, Blue Meridian Partners, and Galaxy Gives** all back The Bail Project's national expansion. The Audacious Project describes The Bail Project as one of its founding initiatives, created to "disrupt" the bail system and scale nationally. Blue Meridian lists The Bail Project among its investees supporting national scaling — though it should be said plainly that Blue Meridian's reported $350 million in combined first-phase investee funding is not, based on the records reviewed, specifically attributable to The Bail Project, and I am not going to claim otherwise without a document that says so. Galaxy Gives, tied to Mike and Sukey Novogratz, lists The Bail Project among the organizations it supports and repeats the organization's stated mission of ending cash bail. Novogratz also chairs The Bail Project's board.

**The Southern Poverty Law Center** deserves its own treatment because its involvement goes well past general advocacy. SPLC's stated federal legislative priorities call for the country to "eliminate cash bail in the federal criminal justice system and provide incentives for states to end this and other racially biased pretrial practices." SPLC has litigated directly against commercial bail companies, including naming Blair's Bail Bonds and Bankers Insurance Company as defendants. And in 2025, SPLC publicly opposed efforts to restore cash bail in Washington, D.C.

## The Mississippi Connection

None of this is theoretical for those of us who do this work in Mississippi. The same national network reaches directly into this state.

In **Jackson**, the MacArthur Justice Center's *Bell v. City of Jackson* litigation produced a 2016 settlement under which the city stopped requiring people arrested for municipal misdemeanors to post money bonds, releasing them instead principally on written promises to appear. In **Meridian**, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the MacArthur Justice Center negotiated a 2019 agreement ending secured money bail in misdemeanor cases. In **Corinth**, the same two organizations brought federal litigation that required the city to stop jailing defendants solely because they could not afford money bail, with most individuals released on recognizance instead. In **Scott County and other counties**, the MacArthur Justice Center, the ACLU, and the ACLU of Mississippi obtained a settlement prohibiting participating counties from detaining felony arrestees solely because they could not afford bail.

The Bail Project has targeted this state directly as well. In 2021 it announced "BAIL OUT the SOUTH," specifically naming Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida for expansion, with the stated objective of advancing bail reform and eliminating cash bail.

And the money keeps flowing here. Current Public Welfare Foundation records show $280,000 awarded in 2026 to the People's Advocacy Institute for the Mississippi Bail Fund Collective, Participatory Legal Defense, and Restorative Justice Diversion, plus another $120,000 to the Mississippi Impact Coalition. That follows $500,000 awarded to the People's Advocacy Institute in 2024 and $234,000 to the Mississippi Center for Justice the same year for structural criminal-justice work in Jackson involving policy advocacy, community education, media outreach, and strategic litigation.

Mississippi is not a footnote to this movement. It is one of the places where the national network's litigation, funding, and advocacy converge most visibly at the state and local level.

# Part Three: The Government's Own Money

Foundation money is only part of the picture. A significant share of the infrastructure behind bail reform was built, and continues to be funded, with taxpayer dollars.

At least six organizations already named in this paper have documented government funding. Three of them have government funding that ties directly to pretrial or bail-system work specifically, rather than to some unrelated program the organization also happens to run — and that distinction matters, because it is the difference between "this organization once received a federal grant" and "the federal government paid to build the very infrastructure this organization uses to argue against commercial bail."

**The Pretrial Justice Institute** is the clearest case. The U.S. Department of Justice describes PJI as an organization "funded in part by the Bureau of Justice Assistance." BJA Grant 2009-DB-BX-K021 specifically supported PJI's pretrial risk-assessment materials, implementation guides, and technical assistance work.

**The Vera Institute of Justice** received DOJ and Bureau of Justice Assistance funding to develop a comprehensive pretrial-release system in New Orleans, working in partnership with PJI. National Institute of Justice records show roughly twenty federal awards to Vera totaling approximately $9.36 million — though those awards span multiple criminal-justice subjects, not bail alone, and I am noting that limitation rather than rounding it up into a bigger number than the record supports.

**The National Association of Pretrial Services Agencies** has perhaps the most historically significant government connection of the three. The federal judiciary's own history states that in 1978 the Department of Justice funded NAPSA to develop national professional standards for pretrial services agencies. Those standards became part of the institutional framework for nonfinancial pretrial release nationwide, and NAPSA's current standards support the abolition of financial conditions of bail. In other words: the federal government paid, in 1978, to help build the professional standards that the pretrial-services field still uses today to argue against the system I work in.

A handful of other organizations are government-funded without a documented connection specifically to bail advocacy yet established. The National District Attorneys Association has received substantial DOJ grants, but I have not tied those specific awards to its historical position on commercial bail. The American Bar Association's Fund for Justice and Education reported more than $36 million in federal grants in one historical filing year, but I have not established that federal money paid for its standards opposing compensated surety. Prison Fellowship Ministries reports approximately $3.5 million in government grants in its latest available filing, with no documented connection yet to bail-reform advocacy specifically. These belong in the record as government-funded organizations. They do not yet belong in the "direct connection" category, and I am not going to claim otherwise until the connection is documented.

Beyond the private organizations receiving government money sits an even larger government role that is easy to overlook: the government agencies that themselves financed, developed, promoted, and provided technical assistance for pretrial alternatives directly. The Department of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the National Institute of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Corrections, the historical Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the State Justice Institute, and state and local pretrial-services agencies and court administrative offices have all played a role in building this infrastructure. DOJ's own historical publications credit the Manhattan Bail Project with launching what became known as the "Bail Reform Movement," after which state statutes were rewritten to emphasize recognizance release and pretrial screening and supervision programs were created across the country.

Based on what is documented here, at least six organizations named in this paper have received government funding, and at least three of them have a direct, documented connection between that funding and pretrial or bail-system reform specifically. That should be treated as a minimum, not a final count, pending a full audit of the remaining organizations' federal awards and IRS filings.

# The Network by the Numbers

Parts One through Three establish that the Anti-Surety Movement exists as a documented, funded national network. Taken together, they also establish roughly how large it is.

This paper has named at least thirty-seven distinct organizations with a documented role in this network — litigation groups, national advocacy organizations, private foundations, government agencies, technical-assistance providers, and grant recipients — reaching into at least fourteen states and the District of Columbia, including Maryland, Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado, North Carolina, Tennessee, New Jersey, Louisiana, California, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, and New York.

The documented philanthropic funding flowing through the organizations and initiatives identified in this network exceeds $219 million, although not every dollar was earmarked exclusively for bail or pretrial reform — MacArthur's Safety and Justice Challenge total and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's commitment to FWD.us both span broader criminal-justice work, of which pretrial and bail reform is a documented part rather than the sole purpose.

That funding breaks down as follows: over $116 million from the MacArthur Foundation's Safety and Justice Challenge since 2015, a publicly announced $100 million three-year commitment from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to FWD.us, more than $3.2 million from the Public Welfare Foundation across its Pretrial Justice Institute funding, its 2013 pretrial-reform grant slate, and its current Mississippi grants, $440,000 from the Ford Foundation to Civil Rights Corps, and $100,000 from Open Society Institute–Baltimore explicitly earmarked to help eliminate money bail in Maryland. On top of that sits at least $9.36 million in documented federal awards to the Vera Institute of Justice alone, part of a government-funding picture that also includes direct Department of Justice and Bureau of Justice Assistance support for the Pretrial Justice Institute and the 1978 federal grant that built the National Association of Pretrial Services Agencies' standards in the first place.

That is the floor, not the ceiling. Several funding relationships named in this paper — Blue Meridian Partners' support for The Bail Project, the full scope of Arnold Ventures' research portfolio, the National District Attorneys Association's and American Bar Association's federal grants — are real and documented but not yet quantifiable to a specific bail-related dollar figure with the records reviewed here. The number will only grow as that accounting continues.

# Part Four: Advocacy Is Also a Profession

For many of the organizations named in this paper, advocacy against commercial surety bail is not a temporary cause or a volunteer effort. It is a profession.

These organizations employ executives, attorneys, researchers, lobbyists, communications staff, policy directors, organizers, and consultants whose livelihoods depend on maintaining funded advocacy programs. Those positions come with salaries, health insurance, retirement contributions, travel budgets, vehicles or transportation allowances, and other benefits, the same as any other career. Entire professional careers can be, and have been, built around criminal justice advocacy — regardless of whether the specific campaign of the moment involves bail, incarceration, sentencing, or policing.

That creates a financial dimension to this movement that deserves the same scrutiny the movement routinely applies to my profession. Foundations provide grants. Government agencies provide contracts and awards. Advocacy organizations employ staff. Researchers receive funding. Consultants are retained. Litigation is financed. Conferences are held. Communications campaigns are purchased. Taken together, criminal justice reform is not just a cause. It is an economic ecosystem, with its own payroll, its own vendors, and its own institutional interest in the underlying issue continuing to require funded advocacy.

I want to be precise about what I am, and am not, arguing here. There is nothing inherently improper about being paid for professional work. Earning a salary does not make someone's research wrong, and it does not prove bad faith. I earn a living in this business too. But the financial-interest argument cannot be raised only when the person earning a living is a bail agent. If financial motivation is relevant to how the public should weigh the arguments made by bail agents, insurers, and surety associations — and the movement has spent years insisting that it is — then the same standard has to apply to the salaries, grants, government contracts, and institutional interests of the organizations working to eliminate that profession. Financial interest does not exist on only one side of this debate.

A complete accounting of the Anti-Surety Movement should ask the same questions of these organizations that they have long asked of mine: Who is being paid? How much are they being paid? Who provides the money? What benefits and compensation are provided? How much organizational revenue depends on continued criminal justice advocacy? And what happens to those organizations, and to those positions, if the issue they are funded to work on disappears?

That last question is worth sitting with. A bail agent's income depends on defendants showing up to court and their obligations being satisfied — the agent's financial interest is aligned with the outcome the public actually wants. An advocacy organization's funding depends on the underlying campaign continuing, regardless of whether the policy fight is won or lost. That distinction does not make advocacy dishonest. It does mean the two forms of financial interest are not the same, and neither should be exempt from examination.

# Part Five: When the Narrative Meets the Results

The size of the Anti-Surety Movement is only half the story. The other half is whether the policies it has promoted have actually delivered what was promised to lawmakers, courts, taxpayers, and the public.

For years, the recurring propositions from this movement have been consistent: that financial bail unnecessarily incarcerates people because of poverty; that nonfinancial release is inherently less restrictive; that government pretrial programs can replace private surety accountability; and that actuarial risk-assessment tools can safely tell the government who to release. Two of the most consequential of those propositions — that removing financial accountability carries no public-safety cost, and that algorithmic risk assessment can safely stand in for individualized bail decisions — have now been tested in the real world, by researchers with no stake in the bail industry, and the results deserve to be examined as carefully as the promises were.

**Yolo County, California**, offers one of the clearest real-world tests. Rather than debate the theory, the Yolo County District Attorney's office examined what actually happened to people released under California's emergency zero-bail policy and compared their subsequent arrests to a group released on posted bail. The revised January 2024 study compared a random sample of 100 zero-bail releases against randomly selected posted-bail comparison groups over an eighteen-month period. The result: 78 percent of the zero-bail group was rearrested, compared to 33 to 44 percent of the posted-bail groups. The zero-bail group accumulated 169 percent more new crimes, 103 percent more new felonies, 130 percent more new misdemeanors, and 175 percent more new violent offenses than the comparison groups. Yolo's own report acknowledges real limitations — it measured arrests rather than convictions, relied on samples rather than the full population, and did not control for every social or economic variable. Those limitations do not erase the findings. They mean the study should be read for exactly what it demonstrates: a real-world removal of financial accountability produced dramatically different outcomes than posted bail did, and that raises serious public-safety questions that deserve a direct answer rather than a dismissal.

**Harvard Law School's Access to Justice Lab** provided a second, independently conducted test — this one of the Arnold Ventures Public Safety Assessment, the risk-assessment tool many jurisdictions have adopted in place of individualized bail decisions. In Dane County, Wisconsin, Harvard researchers ran a randomized controlled trial in which some judicial officers received the risk score and others did not. The results showed no statistically significant improvement in failure to appear, new criminal activity, new violent criminal activity, days of pretrial incarceration, or measures of racial or gender fairness. New criminal activity was recorded at 27 percent without the tool and 28 percent with it. Failure to appear was 21 percent without it and 22 percent with it. New violent activity was 6 percent without it and 7 percent with it. The researchers concluded that while the tool modestly affected some judicial decisions, those changes did not translate into better or worse criminal justice outcomes. I want to be precise here, because precision makes the argument stronger, not weaker: some commentary has characterized this study as proving the Arnold tool has "no predictive ability at all." That overstates what Harvard actually found. The researchers pointed to inadequate risk-classification power as the more likely explanation for the flat results — they did not conclude the underlying instrument has literally zero predictive value. The actual finding is powerful enough without exaggerating it: a taxpayer- and foundation-backed algorithm, tested by a neutral university lab, failed to produce the improvements it was built and funded to deliver.

**Government data outside the bail industry entirely** points in the same direction — and it is worth being direct about its age, because that age cuts against the movement's narrative rather than helping it. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics' 2007 report on felony defendants in the nation's seventy-five largest counties remains, as of this writing, the most recent national dataset of its kind that the federal government has published. BJS relaunched its national pretrial data collection in 2021 aiming to produce updated findings, and as of now that effort has not yet delivered comparable published results. In other words: the best national government data on how surety bail performs against the alternatives is nearly two decades old not because the question stopped mattering, but because the government's own attempt to update it is still unfinished. That report found that defendants released on financial conditions were more likely to make every scheduled court appearance than defendants released on recognizance, while unsecured and emergency releases were among the categories most likely to produce bench warrants for failure to appear. It recorded an 18 percent failure-to-appear rate for surety bonds, with statistical modeling estimating roughly 20 percent for surety, 24 percent for recognizance release, and 28 percent for unsecured bonds after controlling for other variables. Economists Eric Helland and Alexander Tabarrok later analyzed national BJS data directly and found that, controlling for defendant characteristics, commercial surety defendants were 28 percent less likely to fail to appear than comparable recognizance defendants — and when a surety defendant did fail to appear, that defendant was 53 percent less likely to remain a fugitive for an extended period. More recent, jurisdiction-specific evidence points the same direction: research out of Dallas County, tracked through that county's own Criminal Justice Advisory Board, has continued to show commercial bonds producing better appearance rates than other release mechanisms.

A fair objection to raw appearance-rate comparisons deserves to be stated plainly rather than ignored: defendants who post commercial bail are not randomly assigned. Posting bail requires resources — the defendant's own or a family's — and that same access to resources can correlate with employment, housing stability, and other factors that independently predict whether someone shows up to court. A simple comparison of surety defendants to recognizance defendants risks mistaking correlation for causation if it stops there. That is precisely why the Helland-Tabarrok finding carries more weight than a raw comparison would: their analysis controlled for defendant characteristics before measuring the gap, and commercial surety still outperformed recognizance release by 28 percent on failure to appear. Controlling for defendant characteristics substantially strengthens the finding that observable differences between the defendants alone do not explain the performance gap.

**The "least restrictive" assumption deserves scrutiny too.** A common argument from this movement holds that nonfinancial release is automatically the least restrictive alternative available. That assumption becomes considerably more complicated once "nonfinancial" release starts to involve government supervision, electronic monitoring, curfews, drug testing, mandatory treatment, travel restrictions, repeated reporting requirements, and the real possibility of incarceration for a technical violation that has nothing to do with the original charge. Is a private financial guarantee genuinely more restrictive than months of continuing government supervision, backed by the threat of jail for missing an appointment? "Nonfinancial" and "unrestricted" are not the same thing, and the movement's own framing too often treats them as if they were.

**There is also a citation problem worth documenting on its own.** Discussions billed as debates about bail too often consist almost entirely of participants who already agree that financial bail should be eliminated. In one telling example, a panel discussed the supposed harms of the commercial bail industry in a state that has prohibited commercial bail bonds for decades. The next stage of this research should trace the actual citation chain: a foundation funds Organization A, Organization A publishes research, Organization B cites it, Organization C republishes the conclusion, the media reports Organizations B and C as independent authorities, and legislators are eventually shown multiple "independent" sources that all trace back to the same original research and the same funding network. That chain can be proven or disproven through footnotes, grant records, published reports, legislative testimony, and organizational partnerships. It should not simply be called an echo chamber. It should be mapped.

None of this proves that every reform has failed or that every surety-based system has succeeded. It proves something more defensible, and more important: the Anti-Surety Movement's sweeping claims are not entitled to be accepted on assertion. They can be tested against outcomes — and where they have been tested by neutral parties with no stake in the bail industry, the results have not matched the promises.

# Conclusion: Bail Works

For decades, the Anti-Surety Movement has attacked professional bail through litigation, legislation, lobbying, foundation-funded research, government-funded programs, public relations campaigns, academic studies, and organized advocacy. Millions of dollars have moved through foundations, nonprofit organizations, government grants, research institutions, legal organizations, and pretrial programs, all built around the argument that professional surety bail should be reduced, replaced, or eliminated.

This is also a professional advocacy industry in its own right, built on salaries, grants, and government contracts rather than volunteer conviction. Financial interest does not exist on only one side of this debate, and it should not be raised only when the person earning a living is a bail agent.

After all of the money spent, all of the litigation filed, all of the studies published, all of the conferences held, and all of the legislation promoted, the Anti-Surety Movement still has not proven its case. The evidence does not establish that replacing professional surety bail produces a safer, more accountable, more effective criminal justice system. Some of the strongest evidence raising doubt about that claim has come from outside the bail profession entirely. Yolo County's own revised study found substantially higher rearrest rates among its zero-bail sample than among its posted-bail comparison groups. Harvard's Access to Justice Lab found that a foundation-funded risk-assessment tool, tested through a randomized trial with no bail-industry involvement, produced no improvement in appearance rates, measured public-safety outcomes, pretrial incarceration, or the racial and gender fairness measures examined.

That matters because professional bail has repeatedly been told that prediction, government supervision, algorithms, and taxpayer-funded pretrial programs would provide a better replacement. But prediction is not accountability. A risk score attempts to guess what someone might do. Professional surety bail creates an obligation the moment a court determines that a defendant may be released. The surety assumes financial risk. The bail agent carries a direct responsibility to both the defendant and the court. And when a defendant fails to appear, there is a private financial incentive — not a bureaucratic process, an actual financial incentive — to locate that person and return them to face the case against them.

There is also a basic question of who pays. Government-run pretrial systems require salaries, benefits, offices, vehicles, equipment, supervision, administration, training, and technology, funded continuously by taxpayers. Professional bail agents fund their own businesses, their own employees, their own vehicles, their own insurance, their own equipment, and their own licensing, while personally assuming financial responsibility connected to whether a defendant returns to court. Courts, sheriffs, clerks, and warrant systems still exist either way. The difference is that professional bail transfers a substantial share of the appearance-enforcement cost and financial risk onto private parties, rather than requiring government — meaning the taxpayer — to absorb all of it.

Meanwhile, the bail profession is still here, doing what it has done for generations: helping defendants obtain lawful pretrial release and working to make sure they return to court. That work lets prosecutors prosecute, defense attorneys defend, judges adjudicate, and victims have their cases heard. When defendants fail to appear, bail agents have both an obligation and a direct financial incentive to find them and bring them back. That is not a theory. It is the daily work of this profession.

The profession is doing more than defending itself, too. State associations across the country are increasingly working directly with judges, prosecutors, court clerks, sheriffs, and legislators on statutory compliance, surrender procedures, bond discharge, failure-to-appear warrants, and court-records practice — making the system work better rather than simply arguing for the profession's survival. That is what making a profession indispensable actually looks like: not demanding a seat at the table, but demonstrating value to the people who run the system every day.

This also points to something worth stating plainly: the answer to legitimate concerns about excessive bail is not necessarily eliminating surety bail altogether. Courts can enforce individualized bail decisions, follow statutory requirements, preserve due process, and apply the least restrictive lawful conditions appropriate to each defendant — without removing accountability from the system entirely. Financial conditions should never become punishment before conviction. But preventive detention should never become an easy substitute for a lawful system of conditional release, either.

The Anti-Surety Movement has had enormous resources behind it. It has major foundations, national organizations, paid advocates, attorneys, academics, research institutions, public relations operations, government grants, and taxpayer-supported programs. It has had decades to make its case.

Professional bail has something different.

It has results.

Defendants appear. Cases move forward. Warrants are pursued. Fugitives are returned. Victims get their day in court. Courts gain another layer of accountability without requiring taxpayers to fund another government bureaucracy to provide it. After decades of attacks, professional bail remains part of criminal justice systems across America because the fundamental service it provides has not disappeared. Illinois has eliminated financial bail outright, and other jurisdictions have sharply reduced commercial surety — those are real changes, not nothing. But no alternative the movement has funded, litigated, or studied has yet demonstrated that it can universally replace the accountability function of surety bail while consistently producing better appearance, public-safety, and taxpayer outcomes.

The Anti-Surety Movement has spent years explaining why bail should not work.

Professional bail agents continue showing America that it does.

**Bail works.**

[The Anti-Surety MovementWho They Are, Who Funds Them, and What Happens When Their Promises Meet the Results![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/00/fd/00fd0d7a-5dbf-4abb-b1ce-af93b19f871f/content/images/icon/5d8de952517e8160e40ef9841c781cdc14a5db313057fa3c3de41c6f5b494b19-b34a14e9-330d-4e76-9c29-24112090fc6f)MediumMichael D. Morrison![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/00/fd/00fd0d7a-5dbf-4abb-b1ce-af93b19f871f/content/images/thumbnail/1-2KyT98Oevzx7HOVmnH3wgg-42d0912e-45d2-4453-939d-f1c829d6f3a9.png)](https://medium.com/@mdmorrison/the-anti-surety-movement-b73ab3aafa34?ref=mike-morrison-public-safety-and-accountability.ghost.io)

BIO: Michael D. Morrison is a licensed bail agent in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with hands-on experience in the pretrial system since 1991\. He serves as President of the Mississippi Bail Agents Association and is a national representative with the Professional Bail Agents of the United States, where he was named the 2026 PBUS National Bail Agent of the Year. His writing on surety bail, pretrial accountability, and public safety has reached approaching two million social media views in 2026\. Independent, plain-spoken, and grounded in decades on the ground, he wrote this piece to document, in detail, the national network working to end the profession he has spent his career in.

© 2026 Michael D. Morrison. All rights reserved.