Pretrial inequalities: The effect of bail reforms on racial & ethnic disparities

• In Event: Prosecution in the Making I: Prosecutorial Discretion: Plea Bargaining and Pretrial Detention

Abstract

This study aims to explore whether bail reforms substantially reduce racial and ethnic disparities in pretrial decisions by investigating how pretrial disparities in New York state changed from the year before (2019) to the period after (2020 –2024) the implementation of statewide bail reforms. The outcomes of interest include: 1.) the evolving role of prosecutorial discretion in shaping charging trajectory and bail requests, 2.) pretrial decision (conceptualized as a binary of bail / release), and 2.) the amount of bail set. Pre-reform and post-reform arraignment data is publicly sourced from the York State Unified Court System (UCS) and the Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) and used in fixed-effects model to determine whether racial and ethnic disparities in charging and bail-setting for White Non-Hispanic, Black Non-Hispanic, Hispanic/Latinx, and Other defendants narrowed or widened after the implementation of the new law. Additional analysis is then conducted using a Tobit model to assess the degree to which average bail amounts differ by race-ethnicity. Both of these models utilize case-level legal and extra-legal factors, as well as court-level factors (judge, type of defense, jurisdictional region) to explore the effect of race-ethnicity on pretrial outcomes net of these factors

Author

• Esther Laaninen, Rutgers University