From University of Pretrial:
Seventy-three percent of people facing criminal charges—including immigration cases1—in federal district courts are detained and never released during the pretrial period.2 This is a high rate of detention, especially given that no one in the federal system is ever held only because he or she cannot afford financial bond (18 U.S.C. §3142(c)(2)); a specific process must be followed before a court can order detention, and secured money bail is not an option.
Proponents of the for-profit bail bond industry often cite this high level of detention to dissuade state and local-level policymakers from adopting a model similar to that used in the federal courts. However, the comparison presumes a false equivalence. Caseloads in state and local courts are fundamentally different from those in the federal system, in both type and severity. Immigration cases, for example, comprise more than one-fourth of the federal criminal docket and have very high detention rates. State and local courts, meanwhile, deal with more misdemeanors than felonies.
To conduct a meaningful comparison of federal and state pretrial detention outcomes, researchers at the Pretrial Justice Institute reviewed the law, research, and data, and spoke with members of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOC), the agency providing a broad range of support to federal courts. The findings, articulated in this issue brief, show that high detention rates are not an inevitable outcome of moving away from money bond; many federal jurisdictions have seen appropriately low rates of detention, and some state and local jurisdictions have also successfullymoved away from money bond without an increase in detention.
Continue reading False Equivalence: Local, State, and Federal Detainees here
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