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.
Just that I understand that violent crime often takes priority.
prevents poor people escaping.
FTFY. So it's not going to solve this problem - your guy would just pay his bail and be gone.
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.
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.