I mostly find your argument convincing, but keep in mind that there is no unitary "US government": most charges are under state law. This means that although the national government can know where you are down to the apartment number, you can be (legally) completely unreachable to the state that has ordered you to trial. The solution may be to just lock up the accused more liberally than in Europe, but I'm curious how Europe handles this problem in the Shengen zone.

You just extradite them, same as the American states do when someone flees to a different state.

I've yet to hear of someone being "untouchable" in another Shengen country. Are American state criminal laws that incompatible with each other?

Since you are the second poster to spell it wrong: It's Schengen.

The European Arrest Warrant sorts a lot of it out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Arrest_Warrant

The people who will skip trial and go underground are the reason this system exists. These aren’t professionals with mortgages.

> These aren’t professionals with mortgages.

Really? What kind of people are they?

The kind who can't/won't make a living within the bounds of the law. I've known a few characters personally who have been in and out of jail, and they did not have mortgages or steady jobs that gave them skin in the game of Good Behaviour.

None of them were flight risks though.

If they're not flight risks and are not able to permanently disappear from the justice system's reach, then they're not the reason the bail system exists.

The main problem isn’t flight or cinemaesque disappearing, it’s simply avoiding arrest and being out in the community reoffending. If you’re busted for dealing meth and get released pending trial and then don’t show you’re probably just out there selling meth again, crashing at a buddy’s place and avoiding getting pulled over.

In Europe, the small minority deemed likely to reoffend are simply kept in jail pending trial. Are you saying that people likely to reoffend should not be allowed to do so unless they can afford the cash bail (which will be reimbursed once they show up to trial)?

Wasn't the purpose of bail an incentive to ensure people show up to their trial? How would expanding the scope of bail's purpose to "keeping people from reoffending" work?

How do they determine “likely to offend”. In use such a vague thing can easily boil down to “while people are less likely to offend than black people”. So those who could get out by paying bail now are eternally stuck.

Just being arrested for something doesn't make someone guilty of an offence. The for a trial is to determine whether the accused is guilty of an offence and whether or not they should be removed from the community to prevent them from re-offending.

In any case, drug dealers are more likely to have the cash to pay their bail and get back out on the street than the regular working poor.

Drug dealers are not rich or even middle class. That’s more Hollywood nonsense.

Western Europe barely works.

Bringing one data point: my ex landlord wasn't really the owner of the house and was scamming rich landlords who had too many properties to control them properly. He also scammed tenants (eg. Not returning deposits).

The London metropolitan police jailed him, plenty of evidence and testimonies. He was released nonetheless, he escaped to Dubai (where he has family), he came back to the UK and opened another real estate company doing the same scam under another name. I fished him using LinkedIn and checking his old LinkedIn contacts.

Metropolitan police was aware of everything as I was in touch with a detective. He had the entire story, the new office location of the scammer, the website and photos showing the entire scam repeating itself and dropped the case.

The police has zero incentive to do anything about criminals, they just get more funding the worse criminality gets. A bail system is not perfect, but prevents people escaping, or at least collect some money from people who want to escape law.

This could be used to compensate victims, but I don't have high hopes for the government ever doing that.

If we want to prevent innocents ending up in jail we could just make victimless crimes legal. Weirdly enough, nobody seems to get behind that.

The lack of prosecution has more to do with priority than lack of bail.

Scams can be hard to prosecute, and the harm inflicted on victims is mostly financial. Personally, I would love to see more internet scammers (spammers in particular) prosecuted, but if I think hard about I can recognize that there might be crimes it more important to investigate.

Money is how people buy food. You need a super strong social safety net to say people don't deserve to buy their own food.

Didn't say it shouldn't be prosecuted.

Just that I understand that violent crime often takes priority.

The goal is to let some guilty walk free so that innocent are not troubled. There are people who know the weak points of the system, sometimes they will escape, but its worse to have someone innocent of a crime in prison.

> but prevents people escaping

prevents poor people escaping.

FTFY. So it's not going to solve this problem - your guy would just pay his bail and be gone.

So because the London police aren't willing to invest time and effort into a crime that you feel strongly about, Western Europe barely works?

You provided one example. I'm going to guess this person could have just posted bail and ran regardless. Bail isn't foolproof, and if you have enough money, you can get out of it. Heck, simply having money makes your odds of getting found 'not guilty' much greater in the US.

The problem is that bail really doesn't work better than a lot of other sorts of interventions. Know what has a good track record? Letting folks go and having them check in regularly. Calling them to remind them of appointments and court dates. And this has the added benefit of not ruining innocent people's lives and it is a better use of taxpayer money.

Not forcing ruin on folks really does help society at large.

Making victimless crimes legal wouldn't help with keeping innocent folks out of jail. Everyone in jail before trial is innocent. It doesn't matter what they are charged with - before trial, they are innocent. Even if the crime committed had a victim.