A sign outside her office reads, “Angie Mardis Bail Bonds. Your Ticket to Freedom.”

The weary travelers who come here are quite relieved, she said, and far from being angry. They compare stories while waiting in her lounge and exchange laughs.

Mardis finds it amusing that insurance companies think she’s a high-risk asset, even though most of her clients see her as a beacon of hope.

“I’ve been told a few times that I’m like the best friend they can have at this point because otherwise they don’t get released from the facility. They like me now. It’s weird,” Mardis said.

She gets two kinds of clients: those who are clueless about the process and those who know it just as well as she does. Her regular clients are some of the only sights that are more common than the visages of perturbed parents.

Mardis has run her business for 26 years, and there’s a guy that’s come for help with bail at least 10 times. He plays it off like it’s no big deal, and she lets him.

Other clients place uncomfortable calls to friends and enemies alike asking for help gathering money.

“I don’t judge any of them,” Mardis said. “There’s really not bad people, there’s just some people that make bad choices.”

A New Bail Law

Public Law 147—previously known as House Enrolled Act 1300 upon a passage in the General Assembly in the 2022 session—will limit the ability of charitable organizations to pay someone’s bail. They will now only be able to present money on behalf of a nonviolent offender if they get approval from the commissioner of the Department of Insurance.

However, nonprofits that post bail for fewer than three people per 180-day period are exempt from the certification requirement.

The law also prohibits state or local governments from paying an offender’s bail.

House Bill 1300, authored by Rep. Peggy Mayfield, R-Martinsville, passed in the House 66-24. When it reached the Senate, it passed 35-13. Sen. Greg Taylor, D-Indianapolis, tried to pass two amendments to dilute the bill’s provisions, but both propositions were voted down in the Senate Committee on Corrections and Criminal Law.

The Bail Project

The Bail Project is a national nonprofit that pays people’s bail. It also analyzes policy and encourages bail reform.

Like bond companies, the Bail Project makes an effort to get convicted persons to appear in court. It provides court reminders and transportation assistance. The difference is that its services are free. When people work with a bond company, they pay a nonrefundable bond premium, which typically costs 10-15% of the bail price.

Most of the Bail Project’s clients in Indianapolis are below the city’s median income. Over 70% need assistance with housing, substance use treatment, employment or mental health resources.

Sixty-three percent report they can’t afford transportation to get to court, and 71% report child care to be an obstacle to appearing in court. The demographics of its clients align with the city’s jail population.

Seventy-nine percent are male, and most of them are people of color. Although Indianapolis’ population is 29% Black and 64% white, those who receive aid from the Bail Project are 62% Black and 36% white.

The Bail Project’s Indianapolis Judiciary Report of March 2022, which was requested by the Marion County Superior Court, laid out the data it’s been collecting. Here are some highlights:

• Its Indianapolis branch has provided bail assistance to nearly 1,000 people.

• Ninety-five percent of its clients appear for their court dates.

• Eighty-five percent of its clients did not return to jail for the same case for which they paid bail.

• Seventy-three percent of the organization’s clients are not rearrested during the pretrial period, most of the rearrests being for misdemeanors and low level (F6 and F5) felonies.

• Those who get their bail posted by the organization are 20% less likely to get rearrested than those who work with the commercial bail-bond industry.

According to the report, cash bail is the biggest driver of incarceration. Cash bailis money that someone pays as a guarantee that they will appear in court. If they can’t afford to pay the sum, they are detained until their court date.

The Brennan Center for Justice finds that pretrial detainees account for 70% of the U.S. prison population.

The average cost of the cash bond that the Bail Project posted in Indianapolis from December 2018 to December 2021 was $2,125, which is up from $663 in the last quarter of 2018. The Bail Project reports that to be more than two months of the gross annual income of their clients.

The organization explained the intent of its report in its concluding remarks, which is a separate section from the data.

“It is disheartening to find ourselves the target of legislation and a public campaign to limit or outright ban the free assistance and services we provide low-income Hoosiers. It is even more disheartening to see those who truly understand the complexities of these issues, those with whom we have, in good faith partnered and protected, turn away from this important work rather than leading with reason and nuance in an attempt to elevate the discourse,” the report reads.

“At the end of the day, we do this work because we believe that reliance on wealth in the exercise of justice corrupts the process, undermines its legitimacy, and ultimately costs us all.”

Bail reform: necessary action or nuisance?

She holds clients accountable for paying a 10% minimum of their bond payment, the amount that gets them released from jail. Her goal is to ensure they will appear in court.

“If it’s a bond we’ve written and they miss court, we have arresting power,” Mardis said.

She is often aided by county-hired “recovery agents” or bounty hunters. In Johnson County, most of the people who skip bail and go into hiding are people who paid cash bonds. She only has a few that she’s looking for at present.

If the client doesn’t show up to trial, Mardis has to pay the state the cost of the bond in full. That’s why she works collaboratively with insurance companies that can provide money when needed.

Mardis said the current bail system is fine.

Bail doesn’t punish poor people, she continued, because most people can pay their 10% with the help of personal connections. People shouldn’t commit a crime if they don’t have the money to pay, she concluded.

“I’m sure if you’re stealing from the gas station, you know it’s wrong and you would certainly think there might be consequences. Unfortunately, people’s mindset sometimes is not to worry about what will happen later,” Mardis said.

Unlike the bail system, Mardis said the court system could use some fine-tuning because it’s too slow. She said the local courts can sometimes take a couple of years to settle a case, which means that people repeatedly have to miss work to sit in court for four hours at a time waiting to hear their name.

“It wears on your mind for clients. They don’t know what’s going to happen and how long it’s going to take to get things resolved,” Mardis said.

But she said more leniency on bail payments is the wrong approach because it could lead to more crime.

Mardis said charitable organizations, especially the ones that aren’t certified by the government,  shouldn’t be able to pay bonds because they don’t hold people accountable for their court appearances to the same degree that a company does.

“If the judges and the judicial system want to see things through, they typically need us to make sure they’re going to come back to court,” Mardis said.

Thus, she said the bail system should be left alone.

“I just don’t understand really why the legislators want to change something that’s been working for years and make it less safe for the communities,” Mardis said. “I hope they reconsider.”

Legislative disagreement

He said the fact that the payout limit will now be three per 180-day period instead of two is an improvement but also said the law leaves some matters unclarified. For example, he is unsure if someone could raise money for their bail with a GoFundMe account.

The law will primarily impact Marion and Lake counties, Porter said, the two Indiana counties that have the highest populations and the most charitable organizations. It will further pack jails that are already overcrowded, he said. It will cost some poor people their jobs because they will be stuck in jail unable to post bail and work again. This would deepen the hole of poverty, he concluded, and fracture more households.

Porter said charitable organizations should be able to pay bail if there’s a need. And he said there is a need in his community. These organizations, he continued, are not just throwing money around recklessly. Those awaiting trial have to get approved based on their circumstances and level of need.

Churches should be able to pay bail for struggling people, he said.

“Churches are being scrutinized for doing that, which is part of their ministry,” Porter said. “They’re being handcuffed so they can’t do that.”

Churches are there to help people, he said.

“Everybody’s not perfect, and if you misstep, there are times according to the situation in which they may need help,” Porter said.

People of all demographics should be held accountable for their actions to the same standard, he said. Rich people shouldn’t have an easy escape, and a person’s wealth should not determine their incarceration level, he added.

Part of Porter’s perceived problem is that the bail bond industry is engaged in “entrepreneurship to the detriment of someone else’s situation,” but he said there isn’t much hope of eradicating the network—at least not in his lifetime because punishments are how societies influence behavior.

“When I was coming up, my mother always said, ‘The bottom line is this: If you do something, just remember what the consequences are. Now if you can’t handle the consequences, then don’t do it.’”

Big Homies of America

Big Homies of America, as stated on its Facebook page, is an “advocacy group advocating for holistic change within the Black community.”

Shane Shepherd, founder and president of the organization, said bail matters to him because he serves poor people, and there’s a lot of overlap between poor people and incarcerated people. Bail assistance can be a saving grace for some people, he said.

“[Bail] can throw your whole life in shambles over a 30-day period because if you’re stuck in jail over a relatively low bond and you can’t go to work and you have people that depend on you, then something like the Bail Project can be monumental in your life,” Shepherd said.

Shepherd said people sitting in jail “lose pace with society” because the outside world moves so quickly, and they’re stuck in one place. And because the bail system is built on money, the people he works with face systematic disadvantages.

“It’s not a race thing anymore. It’s a class thing,” Shepherd said.

People need help with their bail, he concluded.

“Of course it’s a beautiful thing that charitable organizations can give to a charity and that charity can aid people in the most needy part of their life. That’s what charitable orgs are for.”