Not to long ago, it was possible to raise no fuss at all while getting arrested, arraigned, assigned bail, and released on bail bonds. Orange County, for better or worse, has changed: today, any nimrod with a cell phone can get a picture of you being arrested and put it up on the web in a matter of minutes. If you’re worried about the effect that an imminent (or just-past) arrest might have on your reputation, here’s a few steps you can take to contain the news.

Halt the Early Spread
Step one is ensuring that your family keeps their mouths shut. That blabbermouth aunt or nosy half-brother can put the news out there faster than the speed of light in the Internet age. Call only someone who will keep the news to themselves, and ask them to do exactly that.

Make Sure your Bail Bondsman is a Professional
California has pretty strict laws about who can become a bail bondsman, so you don’t have to worry that much, but there are still some concerns. Make sure your bail bondsman doesn’t talk about your situation with anyone but the person you choose to put up the fee.

Get Yourself Home Immediately
The faster you get your bail posted, the faster you can get home. Once it’s been paid, you can generally expect a wait of less than three hours for the court to process your bail bonds. Los Angeles courts can take an extra hour or two if it’s the busy season. But in general, if your bail bondsman is good and you got arrested in the AM hours, you can be home before midnight.

Once You’re Home, Be Honest and Open
When you do get the chance to gather and talk to your whole family, do it. You’re going to be going to court in a few months when your court date arrives; you’ll have to explain it one way or another eventually. Best just get everything out in the open with the people who will need to know — including your boss.

It’s always stressful when someone you love gets arrested. Even if they’re innocent, being forced to wait in jail for trial to start can utterly destroy their life. They can lose their jobs, become distant from their friends, and even — if they’re renting — find that they have no home to return to after the trial. Fortunately, the system has created bail bonds: Pasadena‘s way to let them free while they wait for their trial.

Bail bonds are a way of raising money to pay a bail. A bail, in turn, is the price that the court requires a defendant to put up as insurance that they will appear at their trial. If the defendant doesn’t show up, the bail bondsman will  find him and get him back to court. When the defendant finishes with the court the bail is satisfied  and  bail bondsman  will get the money back.

A bail bond is a financial instrument used by a Los Angeles bail bondsman to help you get your loved one out even if you don’t have the money you need. The bail bondsman will take 10% of the bail amount from you, and then give the full bail amount to the court. You don’t ever get that 10% back, but you don’t have to put up the other 90% either.

The bail bondsman then takes on the role of “surety”, meaning he’s using his money to guarantee that the defendant shows up for his court date. Once the money is given over, the defendant will be released within a few hours.

Should the defendant not show up for court, the bail bondsman is in a tough spot — they stand to lose the 100% of the money that they put up if they can’t catch you. That’s why bail bondsmen often have solid relationships with bounty hunters. Try to give them the slip, and they’ll make sure you end up in court even if they have to rough you up to do it.

Fortunately, 99% of defendants aren’t that dumb — in all likelihood, your loved one will be so grateful to your for getting a bail bond in the first place that the thought of skipping out and leaving you with the bill won’t ever occur to them.

What brings together bail bonds, Pasadena police offers, bounty hunters, and defendants? The answer is ‘hopefully, nothing’ — but the realistic answer is “running away”.

You see, a bail bond is a legal surety — an agreement that you make with a bail bondsman that you won’t run away. If you do run away after signing a bail bond, the Pasadena police will be on your butt within hours — and the bounty hunters hired by the bondsman won’t be terribly far behind.

The temptation is always there — you’ve had a taste of jail, but one of your loved ones has obtained a bail bond and gotten you out. You never know how the trial will turn out, but you know for certain that you don’t want to be back in jail again. If you make a run for it, you can count on this: your life will never be the same.

The first thing that happens is that you’ll have a warrant out for your arrest in the State of California. Once you have a warrant, you always have a warrant — the only thing that can end a warrant for arrest is you, being arrested and going to stand in front of a judge. At that moment, any policeman in the state becomes your enemy.

The next thing that happens is that your bail bondsman, who has a vested financial interest in your showing up at court, hires one or more bounty hunters. These bounty hunters are half private investigator, half hunter — and they can cross state lines. That means that making it out of California isn’t going to save you.

Of course, there is the classic “run for the border”, but Mexico has an extradition treaty with the United States, so that’s not really as secure as it sounds, either.

No, really the best way to make sure you stay out of jail is to make sure you win your court case — the option of avoiding court in the first place will uproot everything you know and love about your life and replace it with lingering fear and paranoia. If you’re going to get one of the bail bonds Los Angeles‘ bondsmen offer, do it with full understanding that you’re going to court, end of story.

In terms of bail bonds, Ventura‘s bail system is basically identical to every other such system in the country, likely because most aspects of it are limited by Federal law. As everywhere else, the first step of the bail system is the declaration of bail by a judge at an arraignment.

The next step is the payment of bail. If your loved ones have the resources to post the entire bail amount, they should — if you loyally attend your court dates, they’ll get 100% of the money back once the trial is completed. If they can’t, they’ll need to contact a bail bondsman to get a bail bond.

The bail bondsman will put up the entire amount of the bail in exchange for 10% of the amount of the bail, which he keeps — you’ll never get it back. At that point, the courts appoint the bail bondsman with the responsibility for making sure that you attend all of your court dates — but they also give him the right to compel you, via violence if necessary, to do so.

If he thinks you may be a flight risk, you can expect a competent bail bondsman to take down all manner of your information, from your vital statistics such as height, weight, hair color, and the like to your address, the license plate numbers of your vehicle, a list of any distinguishing characteristics you may have, and the location of any out-of-state family members you might run to.

White collar, blue collar, or black hat, all crimes are treated equally under the bail bond system — if you try to abscond on your court date, someone will be happy to come after you and make sure you attend, whether your crime was shoplifting or mass murder.

With any luck, you’ll never need this information about bail bonds — Los Angeles courts do occasionally hand down reasonable bail amounts or even release defendants on their own recognizance — but you should be ready to consult a bail bondsman should the need ever arise.

They are ubiquitous, the individuals and companies that will take bail bonds – Santa Ana and the rest of the LA area are hardly unique in having dozens and dozens to their names. But what do these people and groups actually do for a defendant?

It’s simple. They give the most precious resource in America: freedom. Of course, when you’ve been accused of a crime, you’re not entirely free; you are compelled to return to court for your court date and abide by the results of your trial. That compulsion is performed by means of bail.

Bail is simply an amount of money that the judge believes is enough to compel you to return to court — if you give the bail amount to the court and then you actually follow through with your obligation, you get it back. If you fail, than you lose the money. That’s why bail amounts tend to be quite high in everyday terms: a bail of a few hundred dollars wouldn’t be enough to compel you to drive to court, much less sit there all day through a trial.

But what if you can’t afford the bail? The state offers a simple alternative: stay in jail. But staying in jail, to be blunt, sucks. You can’t work, so you’ll probably lose your job. You can’t go out to eat, you can’t even sit around and surf the Internet all day. Jail is pretty rotten, even when you haven’t actually been convicted yet.

So, the bail bondsman was invented. Bondsman offer to put up the bail amount — getting you the freedom you need — and the state gives them the authority to hunt you down and drag you back to court if you try to run. They are essentially like expensive and potentially dangerous babysitters who exist so that you can keep living your life.

All told, the price you pay for that freedom — 10% of the bail amount — is a small price indeed. That’s why it’s so easy to find someone to put up bail bonds, Los Angeles, New York, or anywhere in between.

If you’ve gotten that call — you know, the one that someone gets from jail and they choose to call you because they know you’ll help — then you know what it’s like to suddenly need to learn all about the kinds of bail bonds Burbank bondsmen offer.

The most basic type of bail handed down by a court is called a PR, or Personal Recognizance bond. For first-time offenders with no prior record, a PR bond is basically an agreement between a defendant and a judge that the defendant will show up for court. It’s only requirement is that the defendant sign a piece of paper saying that they will show up for court and that they won’t leave town. Suffice to say, if you’ve gotten that call, you’re probably dealing with something more serious.

The next type of bond is a cash bond. In a cash bond, a bail amount is named by the court, and that amount of cash must be put up by the defendant. If the defendant cannot come up with the cash, he must wait in jail until his court date comes. If he can, he is allowed to leave under the same conditions and agreements as the PR bond above.

Finally, there is the most common but most complex kind of bond, the surety bond — often simply called a bail bond. In a bail bond, a new party is introduced to the agreement: a bail bondsman. The bail bondsman will take a fee — legally limited to 10% of the bond amount in the state of California — and in exchange for that fee, he will put up the entire amount of the bond. You must then go through all of the agreements mentioned in the PR bond, but if you renege on them, the bail bondsman has the authority to subdue and imprison you and bring you back to jail, most often through the use of a bounty hunter.

So, if you’ve gotten that call and you’ve found that your loved one has one of those last kinds — the bail bonds — Glendale has someone who can help: a bail bondsman.

When you go to look into bail bonds, Glendale bail bondsmen will be there without hesitation to help you get your loved one out of jail. But before you can do that kind investigation, you need to know a bit about what you’re looking for.

A bail bond is an arrangement between four parties: the defendant, you, the courts, and the bail bondsman. The arrangement works like this: the bondsman takes a fee (mandated by the state of California at 8%-10% of the bond’s value) from you and turns around and gives the courts the total bond’s value in money. If the defendant then goes to court on all of his court dates, the bondsman gets his money back, pockets the fee, and walks away clean. If the defendant reneges on the agreement and runs, the bail bondsman risks losing 80%-90% of his investment, which is usually the point at which Dog the Bounty Hunter shows up and starts getting upset with people.

Fortunately, bail bond amounts are very straightforward. There are no hidden fees, taxes, or any other changes to a bail bond’s face value. That means that when the judge announced your bail at $15,000 (cash or bond, she’ll usually say), you know that you can get a bail bond for only $1,500 and get your life back for the few months between the arraignment and the trial.

Once you’ve found a bail bondsman and delivered the 10% fee, there’s a bit of paperwork you’ll have to go through, including an application of the bail, a bail indemnity document, and a final receipt. From that point in the process, a professional bail bondsman will be able to get your loved one out of jail in as little as two hours.

This is an incredibly important point, because for some defendants, a quick release can mean the difference between losing their job or keeping it, or even being able to pick up their kids from school or not. That’s why it’s important to get a head start on the process of closing bail bonds: Santa Ana to Santa Cruz, people simply have lives they need to get back to. That, in the end, is the all-important unspoken job of the bail bondsman.

When an LA judge hands down a bail price for your loved one that seems overwhelmingly high, you don’t need to panic quite yet. Through the use of bail bonds, Los Angeles defendants can get out of jail for as little as one-tenth of the actual amount of bail.

Many people are under the mistaken impression that a bail amount is a payment you make to the court in order to get out of jail — that’s doubly wrong. First, bail payments only get you out of jail for the duration of your trial; if you get found guilty, there is no bail, there is only jail. Second, bail isn’t a payment; it’s more like collateral on a loan — except instead of money, you get freedom. At the end of the trial, if you showed up for all of your court dates, you get your bail money back.

The bail bondsman essentially puts up bail money for you, so he assumes the risk of your loved one deciding to run off. In exchange for that risk (and the service of getting your loved one out of jail), he takes a fee that runs between ten and twenty percent of the total bail amount.

The precise percentage depends largely on the amount of the bond. Around LA, the general rule is that if the bond is worth $10,000 or less, the fee will be around 20% of the total bond. If the bond is worth $100,000 or more, the fee will be around 10% of the total bond. For values in between, the percentage will be somewhere in between, with quite a bit of variation between individual bail bondsmen.

This amount is then varied again based on the defendant’s history, resources, and the bondsman’s general impression of how likely he is to try to run. If the defendant is viewed as a very high-risk defendant, the bail bondsman may even charge an extra fee to hire a bounty hunter to put on retainer.

These rules hold true for LA and all of the areas surrounding it. If you go there to get your bail bonds, Pasadena will have about the same prices as you’ll find in Ventura.

He’s gone and done it again — landed himself in jail, and you don’t have the cash to get him out this time: you need bail bonds. Los Angeles, fortunately, is blessed with a plentiful quantity of bail bondsmen — people (or sometimes companies) who is willing to lend you money to get your man’s bail paid, for a price.

Generally, that price runs between ten and twenty percent of the total amount of bail (with a smaller percentage for larger total amounts). If that price seems high, just imagine what will happen to the defendant’s life if he has to wait around in jail for a month or three while his trial date rolls around — with no ability to make any money, his reputation smeared even if he eventually gets found innocent, and bills still piling up, things turn south fast.

So the bail bondsman steps in, rescues your man’s livelihood, and he returns to his normal everyday routine while he waits for his court date to come — hopefully. He could always try to run, to avoid court. For the record, we in the profession call that “the bad idea.”

That’s because when he runs, we call out the big dogs — bounty hunters — to make sure he shows up. It’s nothing personal, but we put a lot of money — five to ten times the amount that you did, to be precise — on the bet that he’d show up. If we have to spend a bit on some muscleheads to secure the outcome we desire, we will. But we’d much rather let you lean on him to do the right thing.

There are a lot of places to find a person who can help you with bail bonds — Burbank to Santa Ana, bail bondsman are in every area around LA. You can always call your local sheriff, jail, or courtroom and ask for a recommendation, or you can go to Google and try to find a bondsman with a competent online presence — either way works.

When it comes to bail bonds, Orange County might seem like it would be a little less familiar with the process than most. After all, the OC is famous for wealthy, upper crust people, and you’d think that such people could generally pay their own bail — but bail amounts are often set by courts that already know how much money you have, and they’re designed to be a hardship.

The end result is that the bail bondsmen in Orange County are just as busy as they are anywhere else — they’re just a little bit richer. For a bail bondsman, however, that just means the risks they take are greater. After all, the clients may pay more, but they also have more resources, which means they have more ability to get away if they decide to run.

That’s an important risk for a bail bondsman to consider, because if the defendant doesn’t appear at court, the bail bondsman is out quite a bit of money. That’s because a bail bondsman’s job requires him to stake quite a bit of his own money on the fact that the defendant will be at court. The process works like this:

• Someone that has been accused of a crime is given bail, meaning an amount that they have to pay to secure their release from jail until the trial is over.
• That person’s loved ones have to come up with the bail amount, and if they don’t have it, they contact a bail bondsman.
• The bail bondsman then collects a fee — generally between 10% and 20% of the total amount of bail — and puts up the entire bail amount.
• If the defendant shows up each trial date until the end of the trial, the bail bondsman gets his money back, keeps the fee, and everyone goes on their merry way.
• If the defendant runs, the state will generally give the bail bondsman a set period of time to get the defendant back into the courtroom before they seize the bail money and the bondsman loses it all. This is the period when a bail bondsman generally hires a bounty hunter to retrieve the runaway defendant.

See? In terms of bail bonds, Los Angeles isn’t that much different from Orange County, the Bronx, or Omaha — in the end, more money doesn’t mean all that much.