It was last March, and a legal scholar of no small note, Erwin Chemerinsky,the uber-progressive  dean of the wildly-woke UC Berkeley Law School, took to the op-ed page of the Sacramento Bee to call for reform.

California should join other states that are abandoning the traditional bail system for those awaiting trial and replace it with an assessment of a person’s danger to society or flight risk. Senate Bill 10, now pending in the legislature, would be a huge step forward for the state and make an enormous difference in people’s lives. It also is essential in light of a recent decision of the California Court of Appeal declaring California’s bail system to be unconstitutional.

The system used in California was based on a bail schedule, a set amount of bail for an offense, such that the amount bore no connection to the person. If you were charged with larceny, you paid the bail for larceny, whether you were a guy with 28 prior larcenies or Pope Francis. It was a ridiculous, and unconstitutional, system. To add insult to injury, the nice folks who benefited most from this system were bail bondsmen, vultures despised by everyone until you needed to get bailed out.

The reality is that those with money quickly can get out of jail, but those who are too poor to afford bail or the bond are left to remain incarcerated. During this time, they can lose their jobs and their families can suffer greatly. Personal wealth is often the only thing that determines who is free while awaiting trial and who remains in jail.

And as Chemerisnky decried, it was wrong and must be changed, so the syllogism came into play.* This new law was change. And so it was enacted** and signed into law.

With the new law, scheduled to take effect in October 2019, “California reforms its bail system so that rich and poor alike are treated fairly,” Brown said Tuesday after signing the bill.

There is no doubt that the old system was wrong and unconstitutional, and change was needed. But as should be clear by now, The alternative to bad isn’t necessarily good. It can be worse. And after all the tears of joy were wiped away at this massive success for reformers, it dawned on the folks who actually know stuff about law that they traded one bad idea for another.

But some longtime opponents of cash bail said the new law would simply replace one system of pretrial detention with another, based on decisions by individual judges who will consider a set of prescribed “risk assessments” and then decide, with little possibility of appeal, whether a defendant is safe enough to release or must remain behind bars.

SB10 “cannot guarantee a substantial reduction in the number of Californians detained while awaiting trial, nor does it sufficiently address racial bias in pretrial decision-making,” said leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union in California, who had supported a version of the bill that gave judges less control over pretrial release.

Any lawyer in New York could have told them that the new system wasn’t going to produce miracles. We’ve been trying to reform this disastrous system for years, and California just enacted it to reform its disastrous system,

There are two components to this “reform,” the first being individualized determinations by judges and the second being “risk assessment tools,” which makes it sound far more science-y and official. But the problems is that they’re a black-box proxy for the same old excuses not to release a defendant that historically held the poor and minorities in jail. No job? No home? Prior convictions? Prior bench warrants? Who would release such a person who seems almost destined to abscond. But who do these factors describe?

The other problem is that the decision is now in the hands of judges, which might not be so bad if judges did their job, without fear or favor. But they don’t, because we won’t let them. Make a bad call and the public loses their minds over a horrible judge, who took a chance and it backfired. We blame the judge for lacking the ability to see into the future that a defendant released would go out and commit a horrific crime. It’s the judge’s fault, because we had this miscreant in custody and the judge cut him loose!

Then there’s the Persky Effect, where a disingenuous prawf, Michelle Dauber, managed to delude enough ignorant people into throwing a good and decent judge off the bench because they hated the sentence he imposed on Brock Turner because it was too lenient. What judge wants to be the next Persky, to free a defendant only to have him rape someone and become the next target of the Dauber mob?

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi said SB10 “handed the keys to the judges,” and he fears that the new law “will result in more people being locked up.”

There is no question but that the system in place in California needed reform. And indeed, in the hands and hearts of activists, the recognition that something is wrong, followed by strings of reasons and heartbreaking examples of how awful the current system is, makes for a compelling case that change is needed.

But what that reform should be is invariably a great deal harder than telling another sad story. That’s the part the seems to always elude the unduly passionate. Not only do they fail to consider unintended consequences, but they lack the knowledge and experience to grasp what the change they demand actually does.

As Adachi notes, SB10 isn’t going to mean poor people will now be allowed to walk free, but that “rich” people, meaning people who have some modest savings or the ability to pay a bondsman to get him out, will be stuck in jail with the poor person. For some activists, this isn’t such a bad thing, as they harbor the peculiar notion that equity means wealthier or whiter people should suffer more so as to match the suffering of poor and black people. They take joy in other people’s suffering, because if they can’t help people they like, at least they can harm people they don’t.

For those people who aren’t consumed by racial hatred and resentment, the realization hit home that their quest for reform prevailed, and they went from bad to worse. It’s not they weren’t warned.

*The syllogism goes like this:

Something must be done.
This is something.
This must be done.

**Blame is laid on last minute amendments to SB10, which gave “too much power to judges,” according to the ACLU, which will further exacerbate “racial biases and disparities that permeate our justice system.” This was the cost of reform, as there was no way the Calfornia lege was going to be responsible for letting somebody walk and then go out and commit a rape or murder.

The public is oddly fickle about such things, wiping away tears with every sad anecdote, and then filling with rage when the occasional horrible outcome happens, as everyone in the system knows with absolute certainty will occur. And they will take their fury out on someone, because it’s government’s duty to never let bad things happen to good people.