Abstract
Despite growing interest in bail and pretrial detention among both academic researchers and policymakers, systematic research on pretrial release remains limited. In this article, we examine bail and pretrial release practices across seventy-five large U.S. counties from 1990 to 2009 and look at the contextual correlates of bail regime severity. We find tremendous intra-county variation in bail practices, as well as a nationwide decline in the use of nonfinancial release and doubling of bail amounts during this period. This variation is not accounted for by differences in case composition across jurisdictions or over time. Patterns of bail practices are associated with political, socioeconomic, and demographic factors, however. Implications of these findings for future research on bail and pretrial detention are discussed.
- © 2019 Russell Sage Foundation. Hood, Katherine, and Daniel Schneider. 2019. “Bail and Pretrial Detention: Contours and Causes of Temporal and County Variation.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 5(1): 126–149. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.1.06. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. We received helpful comments and advice from David Harding, Chris Muller, Kristin Turney, Sara Wakefield, and participants in the Russell Sage Foundation conference “Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality.” Direct correspondence to: Katherine Hood at khood{at}berkeley.edu, 410 Barrows Hall, Department of Sociology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94703; and Daniel Schneider at djschneider{at}berkeley.edu, 480 Barrows Hall, Department of Sociology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94703.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.