If you think "if someone is out on bail or personal recognizance that the courts would come down heavily on that person" you have not been paying attention to the Lane County jail revolving door for the last few decades.

"Catch and release" is the real mantra.  

I often post the multiple prior arrests here; many of them also include probation violations and parole violations, much less crimes committed during to jail releases either on recognizance or just by overcrowding.

This is not new!  

I had one decades ago who I talked a Judge into probation for at 10:00 AM and I heard him being arrested on my police scanner when I was on my way back from lunch.  His new crime got him a few days in jail.  The 'Sentencing Guidelines' control that sort of thing, not the Judge.

Or there was the one who was released from jail with a bus ticket to a new job out of town so he could avoid 'bad companions' who shoplifted a carton of cigarettes on the way to the bus depot.  Couple of days extra.