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Discretion, Exchange and Social Control: Bail Bondsmen in Criminal Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Forrest Dill
Forrest Dill*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Stony Brook
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An impression widely held has it that American criminal courts are caught in a crisis. The manifestations of this presumably critical condition are well-known: ever-expanding workloads; indigent defendants held for weeks, months, and sometimes years of pre-trial confinement; officials and attorneys preoccupied with the mechanics of “plea bargains” instead of the intricacies of trials; protracted delays in settling some cases; disposition of other cases by means of arbitrary and prejudicial techniques; pervasive inequalities in sentencing decisions, and so on.

During the last five years, these symptoms have received attention from a number of respected journalists (James, 1971; Downie, 1972; Jackson, 1974). Criminal courts and their ailments have come under extensive study by several recent government commissions (President's Commission, 1967; Skolnick, 1969; National Advisory Commission, 1973). Social scientists have also shown increasing interest in these problems (Skolnick, 1967; Blumberg, 1970; Mileski, 1971; Levin, 1972; Mather, 1974).

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , Summer 1975 , pp. 639 - 674
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

*

This work was made possible by financial support from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Walter E. Meyer Research Institute of Law and organizational support from the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley. I am most grateful to Marc Galanter, Sheldon L. Messinger, Philippe Nonet, Jerome H. Skolnick, and Gerald D. Suttles for helpful comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of this paper.

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