Examining Federal Pretrial Release Trends over the Last Decade

• Published in: Federal Probation 2018-09, Vol.82 (2), p.3-56
• Main Authors: Cohen, Thomas H, Austin, Amaryllis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Drug courts; Imprisonment; Noncitizens; Pretrial detention; Prosecutions; Rape; Risk assessment; State laws; Trends
• ISSN: 0014-9128; 1555-0303

[...]the report focuses on only those defendants prosecuted by U.S. Attorneys for new offenses in the federal court system and who had a reasonable expectation of bail.6 Data for this study were extracted from the Probation and Pretrial Services Automated Case Tracking System (PACTS), the case management system used by federal probation and pretrial officers. [...]the percentage of drug defendants without any record of prior felony arrests released pretrial declined by 10 percentage points from 63 percent in 2008 to 53 percent in 2017, while their counterparts with 5 or more prior felony arrests were released at comparable rates (21 percent in 2008 vs. 20 percent in 2017) during the study coverage period. Specifically, the bail decision is the opportunity for the court system to conserve financial resources, uphold the individual's constitutional right to bail and the presumption of innocence, set a positive, rehabilitative tone for the individual and his or her families, and, in low-risk cases where it is merited, divert individuals altogether from incarceration. [...]perhaps even more importantly, a growing number of research studies have shown pretrial detention being associated with higher rates of failure at the post-conviction stage (Gupta et al., 2016; Heaton et al., 2017; Oleson et al., 2014). [...]the federal judicial district in D.C. is omitted from this analysis. 6 Because of the use of these filters, the pretrial release rates displayed in this report will most likely differ from those published by other federal statistical agencies. 7 Given that these districts are still experimenting with methods that allow for the most beneficial and informative use of the PTRA in their bail decisions, we kept their names out of this report.