Erica Grieder: Proposal to regularize bail standards in Harris County is worth pursuing

Changes may be coming to the Harris County bail bond industry—and bail bondsmen aren’t opposed to that, exactly. “It would help me, because I wouldn’t get people calling me for one percent and then cussing me out,” says one, Jason Ayala, discussing a new plan from Harris County commissioners to require bondsmen to set ten percent minimum fees on bond payments. “I’m tired of answering those calls.” With that said, Ayala wasn’t completely sold on the county’s proposal when we spoke Friday. “The reason they came after the bondsmen is we’re the low-hanging fruit in the justice system,” he said. Such a move was inevitable, probably, given the increase in Houston’s homicide rate in 2021. Data show that most people released on bond return to court as agreed, without committing new crimes in the interim.

But the exceptions are high-profile and haunting, raising the hypothetical, in some cases, that a life could have been saved had someone—a prosecutor or public defender, perhaps, or a judge or bondsman—shown greater foresight along the way. All of the players in the criminal justice system should expect to come under scrutiny, with public attention focused on violent crime. Bondsmen are a part of this picture, though not the entire landscape. Harris County commissioner’s court Tuesday passed a resolution, put forward by Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia, exhorting the county’s Bail Bond Board to require licensed bondsmen to make the change in question. The 10 percent minimum is already a rule of thumb, but it’s not necessarily standard in Harris County-nor is it enforced or enforceable, as things stand. An October 2021 Houston Chronicle investigation found that some licensed bondsmen in the county have been accepting lower fees-as low as one or two percent-for some time.