From Brookings:
Reducing pre-trial detention by eliminating cash bail would generate significant economic returns for accused individuals and likely also their families and communities, suggests a paper discussed at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) conference on March 25.
The authors—Will Dobbie and Crystal Yang of Harvard University—note that more than 10 million people are arrested each year in the United States and that, at any point in time, roughly half a million are in pre-trial detention. They cite “the all-too-common stories of arrested individuals who, despite being first-time offenders accused of low-level crimes, spent months in pretrial detention and faced subsequent long-term damage in the form of family separation, work interruption, and loss of housing, or even death.”
“Many of these harms can result even when the period of incarceration is brief and even if individuals are not ultimately convicted of any crime,” they write in The economic costs of pretrial detention.
To assess the effects of pre-trial detention on individuals, particularly younger people, Dobbie and Yang looked at employment and income of people arrested in Miami and Philadelphia from 2007 to 2014. Reviewing evidence in previous research, they note that pretrial detention decreases the probability of employment three to four years after the bail hearing by 9.4 percentage points. And, under a series of assumptions, they estimate that defendants detained pre-trial lost $29,001 in income on average over a lifetime compared with defendants who weren’t detained pre-trial.
Using 1990-2009 county-level data (the most recent available) from a U.S. Department of Justice survey, they show that counties with higher detention rates also experience, on average, higher poverty rates and lower employment rates, particularly for Black individuals. And, the authors present evidence showing reduced economic mobility for children in counties with higher pre-trial detention rates.
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