Distortion of Justice: How the Inability to Pay Bail Affects Case Outcomes

One in five incarcerated people in the United States are in jail awaiting trial, and many are detained due to an inability to pay relatively small amounts of money. This paper uses a natural experiment to analyze whether incarceration during the pretrial period affects case outcomes. In Philadelphia, defendants randomly receive bail magistrates who differ widely in their propensity to set bail at affordable levels. Using magistrate leniency as an instrument, I find that pretrial detention leads to a 13% increase in the likelihood of being convicted, an effect largely explained by an increase in guilty pleas among defendants who otherwise would have been acquitted or had their charges dropped. Pretrial detention also leads to a 41% increase in the amount of non-bail court fees owed and a 42% increase in the length of the incarceration sentence. While I find little evidence of explicit bias, the use of money bail results in disproportionate rates of detention for African-Americans and the poor, with ripple-out effects on case outcomes. Controlling for pretrial detention status reduces the prison sentence differential between blacks and non-blacks by 42%, even after the charge and criminal history have been accounted for. ∗Fellow, University of Pennsylvania Law School, [email protected] †Many people helped considerably on this paper and for that I am grateful: David Abrams, Mira Baylson, Jonah Gelbach, Keir Bradford-Grey, Paul Heaton, John Hollway, Mark Houldin, Charles Loeffler, Sandy Mayson, Chris Welsh, Crystal Yang, participants at the many seminars and conferences where I presented this research, and anonymous referees.