In simple terms:

Bail is an amount of money that you can pay in order to be released from jail while you wait for your case to be handled by the court. Say your bail is set at $1,000. You can pay $1,000 and get out of jail. Assuming you make all required court appearances, you get that money back once your case has been dealt with. If you take off and don’t go to court, you lose the money.

Courts want to set bail high enough to guarantee that you’ll actually show up to court when required. If bail was only $10, someone might pay it and disappear. So they set it higher.

The court might set it so high that you can’t actually pay the full amount. Even though you’d get the money back eventually, you still can’t scrape it together up front. In that case, you can get a bail bond.

The bond is an agreement by a third party — a bondsman — to pay the required bail on your behalf. The court accepts this agreement and lets you out. To get the bond, you have to pay a percentage of the bail amount, like 10% to 15%. Unlike with bail itself, you don’t get all this money back. It’s the price of the bond.

The bond guarantees to the court that you will show up when required. If you don’t show up, then the bondsman has to forfeit the full bail amount to the court, and the court will keep it. The bondsman doesn’t want to lose the full bail amount, of course, so they send a bounty hunter after you to drag you back for your court date.

So: The point of bail is to ensure that you come back to court, either on your own or dragged back in handcuffs by a bounty hunter.

All that said, there are plenty of times when they let someone out with no bail at all because they don’t have any reason to believe they won’t come back to court.