Pretrial Services

Assistant State Attorney Ken Behle takes the assessment a step further, arguing that the Pretrial Services Bureau isn't held responsible for the actions of defendants freed under the program. "You've got to keep in mind that this is their job," Behle says of the bureau. "And if no one were let out in their custody, not only would the jails be filled, but they would most likely not be in business any more. And so, knowing there is very little risk to them, and that they are not going to be held accountable [for the program's failures], their incentive will be to take someone as opposed to keeping that person in jail."

Perhaps the strongest supporter of pretrial release is Judge Gerald Wetherington, who stepped down June 30 after ten years as the circuit court's chief administrative judge. As chief judge, Wetherington had direct administrative control over both the jail and the Pretrial Services Bureau. Given the nearly 55,000 felony arrests each year, Wetherington contends, the bureau has performed consistently well under difficult conditions. "When you think about handling 135,000 [felony and misdemeanor arrests] a year with what we're doing, you have to say that our Department of Corrections and the pretrial-release program have done a miraculous job," says Wetherington. "This community owes these people a tremendous debt of gratitude."

But Judge Petersen says it is misleading to measure the program's success by the number of defendants it releases. A better measure, he argues, would be the percentage of released defendants who return for their court hearings. Buckhalt says that in 1989 only twelve percent of pretrial-release defendants failed to show up in court. By his calculations, 1990 was even better, with a failure-to-appear rate of little more than ten percent.

If these figures are accurate, Dade County's Pretrial Services Bureau is operating one of the most successful programs in the nation. But bail bondsmen and assistant state attorneys strongly doubt Buckhalt's statistical methodology; most of them estimate that between 25 and 30 percent of Pretrial Services' defendants skip their court dates. Those higher estimates are confirmed by a U.S. Department of Justice study conducted in 1989.

Federal researchers tracked 489 randomly selected Dade felony defendants from February 1988 through February 1989 and calculated Pretrial Service's failure-to-appear rate, along with that of defendants released on their own recognizance. (Although the study did not distinguish between the bureau's defendants and those released on their own recognizance, investigators who collected the data say the sample was almost entirely composed of Pretrial Services defendants.) The results dramatically contradict Buckhalt's figures.

Instead of a 12-percent failure rate, the federal study showed a 27-percent failure rate. According to the Justice Department researcher who supervised the study, the vastly different figures are the result of statistical manipulation. Buckhalt's method of calculating the failure-to-appear rate, says the investigator, is not common and is not the method employed by the federal government. It does, however, produce figures that give the appearance of great success. (By way of contrast, bail bondsmen whose clients have a failure-to-appear rate higher than five percent will be out of business, according to Roger Handberg, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida. Private bail bondsmen put this rate at closer to two percent.)

Even more convincing are figures compiled in 1990 by the Bail Bondsmen's Association, which commissioned the Metro-Dade Police Department to write a computer program that would calculate the total number of people who had rearrest warrants issued for them as a result of their failure to appear in court. In 1989 rearrest warrants were issued for 7844 people in Dade, and 76 percent (5964) of those were defendants released through Pretrial Services. Dividing this figure by the total number of people released to the program in 1989 (21,651) the failure-to-appear rate is 27.5 percent - consistent with the Justice Department's study. "If that figure is correct," Petersen laments, "it's very unfortunate. How can they justify their existence with that kind of performance?"

Another measure of the program's success (or failure) might be the rate of Pretrial Services defendants who were rearrested on new charges while awaiting trial, people such as Cornell Austin, Raul Rodriguez, and Carlos Ramirez. (A 1986 study undertaken nationwide by the Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice revealed that defendants released on programs like Pretrial Services committed twice as many crimes while awaiting trial as did defendants released on monetary bail.) Buckhalt places the 1989 rate at 6.7 percent and the 1990 rate at a scant 4.2 percent. But the Department of Justice study based on 1988 figures found the Dade rearrest rate - for Pretrial Services defendants combined with those released on their own recognizance - to be 9.5 percent.