Decision Making and Information Integration in the Courts: The Setting of Bail

Two studies were conducted to determine how real felony court judges decide the amount of bail to set. In the first, the judges were presented with fictitious case histories containing the relevant information in a factorial design. In the second, multiple regression techniques were used to examine the impact of different kinds of information on decisions made by judges in actual bail hearings. In the simulated cases, the judges seemed to be influenced most by the degree to which the accused was tied to the area and whether or not he had a prior criminal record. However, the judges' actual bail decisions were not at all affected by these variables. Instead, their decisions were almost exclusively determined by the district attorneys' recommendations. Both the district attorneys' and the defense attorneys' actual recommendations were found to be primarily based upon the severity of the crime. These results were discussed in terms of the utility of simulation and observational research for drawing applied and theoretical conclusions.