The Poverty Trap of Monetary Bail
Monetary bail ostensibly allows someone accused of a crime to safely move about in the community instead of waiting in jail for their trial. The putative basis for bail is that the money is held in trust by the court to give the accused an incentive to not flee or commit any new crimes.
That's at least the claim in support of monetary bail, but I find it deeply unconvincing. In practice, everyone facing criminal charges is aware that they're on the spotlight and their every move is monitored. If you're facing a low-level misdemeanor and you skip court or leave the state, you will (eventually) get arrested the next time a cop runs your name after pulling you over for a broken taillight. If you're facing a serious felony, they will assign detectives to track you down and divert resources proportional to the seriousness of your crimes. I've had dozens and dozens of clients who skipped court only to find themselves behind bars a few short weeks later with no argument for pretrial release because they burnt the only chance they had.
Clients fucking up their pretrial conditions is by far the worst thing they can do to their case. The functional reality of the US criminal justice system is that if you can't make bail, you're far more likely to just plead guilty instead of fight your case at trial. So someone deliberately skipping town or, my least favorite, cutting off your ankle bracelet (this one gives me infinite facepalming when it happens), is functionally equivalent to relegating your case to resolve in a guilty plea made from a seriously disadvantaged position. That's far better incentive than any money you manage to scrounge up.
Another thing to point out is that bail bond companies exist. They generally charge 10% of the total bail. So if you're held on $50k, you just need to come up with $5k cash and you give that to a bonding company. You'll never see that money again, and ostensibly if you conduct yourself in a way that results in your bail being forfeit, the bond company can legally pursue recovery from you. But if you only could put up $5k to begin with, they're limited in terms of what else they can recover from you.
The only plausible escape mechanism is when you have serious levels of Fuck You Money, enough that you can arrange for private planes and fake passports so you can fuck off to the Philippines and hire bodyguards and drivers to keep you on the down-low. But if you're at that level, you also simultaneously do not care about forfeiting a small ransom at the court clerk's office.
I know that bounty agents theoretically exist, but I've literally never heard of a bounty agent ever tracking down a defendant. That said, once a client goes on the lam, I'm basically uninvolved until I get a call from them in jail. Bail bond companies are backed up by insurance companies, so I figure that 10% is just the actuarially fair premium the industry found to be profitable. If you set up the numbers right, it makes sense to just run the business as a form of passive income instead of spending money on bounty hunters that might get scooped by a broken taillight.