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When most of downtown Houston has shut down for the night, bail bond row is still wide awake. At least 10 surety businesses dot the blocks surrounding the county courthouse complex, many with buzzing neon lights and bright window paint advertising freedom from jail after arrest, sold on an installment plan.
It’s a distinctly American business — one copied only in the Philippines — and for a moment, a decade ago, there were glints of its demise here in Harris County, home to Houston. A federal lawsuit filed in 2016 argued that the county’s misdemeanor bail system effectively jailed people for being poor, violating the Constitution's equal protection guarantee. The case, O’Donnell v. Harris County, produced a 2017 ruling that the Texas Tribune described then as “groundbreaking.” U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal agreed with the plaintiffs, finding that the county “does not provide due process” for poor defendants in detention “for their inability to pay a secured financial release.”
Her decision set Harris County on a path to a consent decree, giving a federal monitor oversight over reforms to remove wealth, or lack of it, as a basis for being detained while awaiting trial for a misdemeanor. At the time — and with another case challenging the county’s felony bail system on the horizon — bail bondsmen openly mused about the impending death of their industry.
Fast forward to 2026, where the politics around pretrial release have swung in the other direction. In Texas, and nationally, some political leaders regularly talk about “cashless bail” as a public safety menace, including President Donald Trump during Tuesday's State of the Union address.
In Texas, that rhetoric has helped spur a state constitutional amendment and a flurry of new laws, including Senate Bill 9, signed in June of last year. The bail bonds industry aggressively lobbied for the new law, which requires secured money bail for certain misdemeanors, narrowing judges’ ability to release people on a promise that they will return to court. Civil rights lawyers say that requirement puts the new law on a collision course with the reforms that Harris County adopted under the O’Donnell consent decree.
“SB 9 conflicts with the consent decree in the sense that it requires the very constitutional violation that the consent decree was designed to remedy,” said Travis Fife, a staff attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, a law firm that has been involved in defending the consent decree.
According to the independent monitors overseeing the decree, more than 80% of misdemeanor arrestees are released pretrial under the reforms, compared with less than half a decade ago. The number of new offenses by people awaiting trial for misdemeanors has not increased, the monitors have said. A 2024 meta-analysis by the Brennan Center, a non-partisan, liberal-leaning criminal justice think tank, found no correlation between overall violent crime rates and changes to cash bail.
Nevertheless, in November, a judge opened the door to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s effort to have the consent decree thrown out, partly based on a potential conflict with the new state law. Paxton has called the consent decree unlawful and has blamed “leftist judicial activists” for “throwing open the prison doors and unleashing criminals back onto the streets.”
SB 9 is only one part of a suite of pretrial detention changes the state enacted in 2025. A separate but related ballot measure that passed overwhelmingly in November, Proposition 3, allows judges to deny bail entirely for people accused of certain high-level felonies, like murder, human trafficking and aggravated sexual assault. This had to be done by amendment because the Texas Constitution, like those in most states, previously guaranteed a right to bail in all cases other than capital murder.
Taken together, SB 9 and Proposition 3 illuminate a two-pronged effort to stiffen pretrial detention: They simultaneously tighten the money-bail pathway for some offenses, while widening the menu of cases where people can be held without bail at all.
This is not just a Texas story. Across the country, state legislatures are reaching for similar tools. Earlier this month, lawmakers in Tennessee teed up a 2026 ballot measure that would expand the categories of offenses for which bail can be denied. Just days later, legislators in Indiana advanced an amendment that would allow judges to deny bail based on a broad finding of danger to public safety — language that critics warn could widen quickly in practice. Voters in both states will decide on the measures in November.
But the new bail program in Texas is unique in one way. When bail reform advocates realized the constitutional amendment was likely to pass, they lobbied hard, and secured a number of new due process protections that were not previously part of Texas’ bail considerations, including the right to a lawyer at bail hearings, and establishing a higher standard of proof before bail can be denied.
“It raises the due process floor, but it also widens the net of who can be detained without the opportunity to make bail,” wrote Emma Stammen, a policy strategist at the Bail Project, a nonprofit that advocates for less restrictive bail policy nationwide. “Whether this amendment protects rights or just packs the jails depends entirely on how judges interpret it.”
It also depends on the resources available. Fife, the civil rights lawyer, cautioned that those protections can become paper rights in counties where bail hearings are perfunctory and indigent defense systems lack the capacity to staff them.
While some bail reform advocates are looking for ways to maximize what they see as a silver lining in Texas’ new amendment, “tough-on-crime” conservatives like Gov. Greg Abbott have declared a much more total victory over the legislative push. “We passed a law and a constitutional amendment that keep those criminals where they belong, and that is behind bars,” Abbott said at an event last week with the family of Brian Lewis, a man who was killed in his front yard in Beaumont last summer. The alleged shooter had been released on bond following an earlier arrest for allegedly beating Lewis so severely that he spent months in the hospital.
Horrifying cases like this often drive political pushes for tougher pretrial policies — rare, vivid tragedies that come to stand in for a system that processes tens of thousands of cases a year. Critics argue that these tragedies can’t be the basis for building a system that treats accusation as guilt. State Rep. Joe Moody, an El Paso Democrat, warned last year that automatic detention without bail can lock people up for months or longer based solely on an allegation. That, he told the Houston Chronicle, is “wrong and immoral.”