From Prison Policy Initiative:
When a person is incarcerated before their trial, they lose more than just their liberty. Pretrial detention also triggers a cascade of harmful consequences. After just a few days in jail, a person can lose their job, access to medical care, custody of their children, and even their homes.1 These consequences reverberate for years. Individual lives, families and communities are devastated.
Pretrial incarceration also undermines safety, increasing the likelihood of future arrest, presumably because of the traumatizing and destabilizing effects of incarceration.2 Reforms that promote public health and safety by allowing individuals to remain in their communities while awaiting trial have generally not been associated with increased crime.3
Cash bail is a primary driver of pretrial incarceration. When assigned cash bail, an accused person must pay a sum of money to obtain their release. Cash bail keeps poor people incarcerated, while those with means can purchase their freedom. Cash bail also perpetuates systemic racism as judges more often assign unaffordable cash bail to Black people facing charges than white people. Black and Latinx people accused of crimes face far greater risk of pretrial incarceration.4
In partnership with the Penn Data Science Group at the University of Pennsylvania, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania analyzed a snapshot of the use of cash bail across the commonwealth. To do this, we purchased a statewide dataset of all magisterial district court bail outcomes from 2016-2017 from the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.
This report examines the use of bail in all 67 counties across the commonwealth. The data shows that:
Finding 1 Magisterial district judges routinely set bail in amounts too high for people to afford. More than half of people assigned cash bail did not post it and remained incarcerated.
Finding 2 Cash bail was the most common type of bail set across Pennsylvania, and set nearly twice as often as release on recognizance (ROR), the least restrictive type of bail.
Finding 3 Some counties rarely assign release on recognizance
Finding 4 MDJs impose cash bail more frequently and in higher amounts for Black people.
Read the full report here.
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