Scaling bail would make it so that if people are repeat offenders, eventually they won't have the assets to put up bail and will be detained in jail until their trial. Sometimes exceptionally violent offenders don't even get the chance to get bail, for safety. The is precedence for this, and the same approach can be applied to repeat offenders
If committing crimes has no repercussion then things like theft have become de-facto legal. If that happens eventually people are going to take things into their own hands, and that's even worse for society.
> Scaling bail would make it so that if people are repeat offenders, eventually they won't have the assets to put up bail and will be detained in jail until their trial
No, it would make it so that if people are repeat targets of prosecution eventually ”won't have the assets to put up bail and will be detained in jail until their trial”.
It's not until after trial that the legal system determines that a crime has been committed.
That doesn't solve the problem - what if e.g. the police harass a person by repeatedly making specious arrests until their bail becomes too high to pay?
Safeguards against police corruption should come in the form of transparency. We need to have safeguards against filing bogus arrests regardless of this whole scaling bail proposal. The same vulnerability to a corrupt police system already exists: police could just fabricate violent charges to justify denying bail on grounds of safety.
The fact that bail should only scale for repeat offenses of lesser crimes is itself an additional safeguard: it would elicit scrutiny if the same set of police repeatedly charged the same person, and it would expand the set of co-conspirators required for corrupt police to pull this off.
> We need to have safeguards against filing bogus arrests regardless of this whole scaling bail proposal. The same vulnerability to a corrupt police system already exists: police could just fabricate violent charges to justify denying bail on grounds of safety.
Violent charges might be taken much more seriously by the system right now; how confident are we that existing safeguards are good enough? Ideally we would have good safeguards, but that doesn't mean it's fine to exacerbate any existing problems.
> it would expand the set of co-conspirators required for corrupt police to pull this off
By how much though? Police have a lot of trust in each other (the job demands it), I think "arrest this dude for suspected littering" wouldn't seem like a huge favour.
If committing crimes has no repercussion then things like theft have become de-facto legal. If that happens eventually people are going to take things into their own hands, and that's even worse for society.