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When individuals are arrested or indicted for a crime, governments have legitimate interests in assuring that those individuals show up for future legal proceedings and also do not cause more social harm in the meanwhile. To serve those legitimate interests, governments may restrain the personal liberty of those presumptively innocent individuals--traditionally accomplished either by incarceration or by release subject to certain sureties and conditions. The choice, in short, is between jail and bail. Currently, governments skew that choice by subsidizing the costs of jail but not bail. The result--wholly predictable given the size and asymmetric nature of the subsidy--is that the United States maintains an inefficiently large jail population that both costs taxpayers too much and excessively limits the liberty of too many. Prior commentators and reformers have correctly identified the overuse of pretrial detention in jails as a major public policy crisis and have urged substantial reforms to current bail processes up to and including the abolition of state constitutional rights to bail (as one state has recently done). We believe that the hostility toward bail overlooks the root cause of the problem, which is the asymmetric subsidization of jail over bail. We propose a balanced subsidization system that can preserve the beneficial aspects of a traditional bail surety system while (i) reducing unnecessary and inefficient restraints on individual liberty, (ii) addressing the distributional inequities of current practices, and (iii) saving taxpayers billions of dollars per year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a brief history of cash bail and an overview of current pretrial practices in the U.S., as of June 2019. Topics discussed include ways in which growing rate of incarceration has been resulted in cash bail system; disastrous effects of the system on individuals, indigent and minority defendants, and the U.S. economy; and need of state legislatures should adopt bail reform laws for ending cash bail.

The article examines bail reform in the U.S. both in order to compare the position with Australia and to understand the background to the current momentum in favour of objective, formulaic risk assessment tools, as of June 2019. Topics discussed include history of the Bail Reform Act of 1966; amendments to statutory laws which authorized detention without bail or restrictive conditions of release based on dangerousness; and the U.S. court case "United States v. Salerno."

The article focuses on the treatment of poverty tax inherent in criminal cases in the U.S. Topics discussed include policing practices that bring low-income people into the criminal justice system; use of individualized bail assessments by judges for supporting poor families; and analysis of collateral consequences of criminal convictions.

This article presents information on bail bond reform. Legally, bail bond and its denial have one basic purpose, to try to assure the appearance in court of the accused. In practice, denial of bond is often used for preventive detention, to detain the individual accused of a serious crime or the individual who has committed serious offenses in the past. At best, this policy is questionable; at worst it is unconstitutional. At least, it violates the principle, "innocent Until Proven Guilty." Still, the idea of keeping allegedly dangerous individuals behind bars prior to trial makes more sense than another common practice-keeping the individual incarcerated prior to trial because he/she is poor. In many jurisdictions, money and/or property are the only means available to gain release from jail before one's day in court. Police officials and even judges are sometimes "silent partners" in bonding companies. And the bonding companies themselves are often well organized and provide an effective lobby for their interests in local and state legislative bodies. One should "go slow" in instituting bail bond reforms. Certainly this advice will be heeded, as it has been historically, since the bondsmen will assure the "slow" movement of any legislation that would significantly impact their business-and often they will be supported by some members of the criminal justice practitioner community.

The article discusses a lawsuit and a legislative bill related to the courts in the U.S. Under Senate Bill No. 73, Acts 1911, which went into effect March 4, 1911, providing that a petition by an appealing defendant to be admitted to bail pending appeal may be filed either in the trial court or in the appellate court, where a petitioner exercised an election and applied to the trial court and was denied bail, he, could not present the same question to the Supreme Court except by appeal. The lawsuit discussed is Commonwealth v. Rusic.