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Does Cash Bail Deter Misconduct?
In recent years, hundreds of jurisdictions across the United States have begun to reduce their reliance on cash bail. Bail reform is motivated by concerns about inadvertent detention for those who cannot afford to pay. However, cash bail is not supposed to be a de facto detention order; rather, it i...
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| Published in: | Policy File 2024 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Request full text |
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| Summary: | In recent years, hundreds of jurisdictions across the United States have begun to reduce their reliance on cash bail. Bail reform is motivated by concerns about inadvertent detention for those who cannot afford to pay. However, cash bail is not supposed to be a de facto detention order; rather, it is a collateral system designed to incentivize released defendants to appear in court and refrain from crime. Indeed, most defendants are not held in jail before their trial; instead, they secure release by paying bail or agreeing to supervisory conditions. Thus, some have been resistant to bail reform out of a concern that it could decrease appearance rates and increase crime. Our work provides new evidence about the extent to which cash bail deters misconduct by evaluating a prosecutor‐led reform in Philadelphia. On February 21, 2018, Philadelphia’s newly elected prosecutor declared that his office would no longer seek monetary bail for defendants charged with a long list of eligible offenses. Also known as the no‐cash‐bail policy, this reform applied to nearly two‐thirds of all cases filed in the city of Philadelphia, including misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. To evaluate the impacts of this policy, we compared outcomes for people charged with these eligible offenses right before and after the policy was enacted, using people charged with ineligible offenses as a benchmark. The no‐cash‐bail policy affected bail‐setting behavior, leading to a sharp 22 percent (11 percentage point) increase in the likelihood of being granted release without monetary or supervisory conditions, known as release on recognizance. However, the no‐cash‐bail policy had no impact on pretrial detention rates. This is because most of those who received release on recognizance because of the reform would have been released after paying low monetary bail ($500 or less) or agreeing to the conditions of pretrial supervision or unsecured bail (i.e., the defendant does not need to pay for release but owes money to the court should they fail to appear). Since the no‐cash‐bail policy changed the conditions of release without affecting the overall release rate, it provided an ideal opportunity to test the deterrent effects of monetary and supervisory conditions among this group of low‐level offenders. Our evidence is inconsistent with such a deterrent effect: neither failures to appear nor pretrial crime increased when the no‐cash‐bail policy was enacted. We were able to isolate the impacts o |
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