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Date: November 22, 2024 Fri
Time: 12:03 pm
Time: 12:03 pm
Results for bail (california, u.s.)
1 results foundAuthor: Tafoya, Sonya M. Title: Assessing the Impact of Bail on California’s Jail Population Summary: Advocates of bail reform have argued that increases in bail levels and wide variation across counties discriminate against indigent and poor defendants and lead to overcrowded jails. Bail reform gained new momentum in 2011 when the Public Safety Realignment Act (known as “realignment”) took effect. In shifting responsibility for lower-level offenders from the state to the counties, realignment has increased concerns about overcrowding in county jails. It has also sharpened the focus on bail reform’s potential to reduce the unsentenced jail population, reduce county jail costs, provide low-risk indigent or poor arrestees a nonfinancial means of securing pretrial release, and make the bail system more equitable without unduly compromising public safety. Over the past decade, California’s bail levels have increased by an average of 22 percent. But counties have not increased their bail schedules uniformly. In fact, some counties have not increased their bail schedules at all. This analysis estimates that a 31 percent drop in the statewide average bail level, which equates to a $10,000 decrease, would result in a 4 percentage point reduction in the share of unsentenced inmates. Given the statewide unsentenced average daily population (ADP) in the year before realignment (50,472), this would translate to 2,843 fewer unsentenced inmates statewide. An alternate measure, using the number of unsentenced inmates per 100,000 residents, yields similar results. The same 31 percent drop in bail would result in an estimated drop of 7 unsentenced inmates per 100,000 residents, or 2,666 inmates statewide. However, these results are driven largely by the most populous counties (and particularly Los Angeles). This suggests that legislative proposals aimed at reducing bail amounts and making them more uniform across the state for the purpose of reducing the number of unsentenced jail inmates may not be widely effective. Reductions in bail are most likely to be effective in counties that rely heavily on bail as a means of pretrial release and that adhere closely to the scheduled bail amounts. The analysis also finds wide variation in bail levels across counties. However, the variation is not correlated with the size of the unsentenced population. This supports the conclusion that reduction in bail amounts across the board may not be the most promising approach for addressing jail overcrowding statewide. But it also suggests that to the extent that judges default to the bail schedule rather than basing bail or pretrial release on an individualized evaluation of risk, reducing bail and increasing uniformity across the state could address pretrial release equity issues. However, these reforms might well achieve greater equity at the expense of public safety without the simultaneous expansion of pretrial programs that effectively identify low-risk defendants for reduced bail, own-recognizance release, or conditional release. Details: San Francisco: Public policy Institute of California, 2013. 23p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed July 24, 2013 at: http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_613STR.pdf Year: 2013 Country: United States URL: http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_613STR.pdf Shelf Number: 129501 Keywords: Bail (California, U.S.)JailsPretrial Release |