Part 6: Houston Police Officers’ Union (2022), Harris County Court Watch Pretrial release reform has become one of the most controversial issues in criminal justice policy, with advocates arguing that unsecured release creates a fairer system while critics warn it reduces accountability and increases public…
Part 5: Reisig (2023) – Yolo County’s Zero Bail Study Zero Bail Produced Significantly Higher Rates of Reoffending Compelling Evidence That Financially Secured Surety Bonds Deliver Superior Public Safety Outcomes This study serves as the fifth installment in our “Six Most Significant Bail Studies” and…
Part 4: Dr. Michael Block – The Effectiveness and Cost of Secured vs Unsecured Release Block, “The Effectiveness and Cost of Secured and Unsecured Release in California’s Large Urban Counties” (2005) Powerful Evidence for the Effectiveness and Cost Savings of Financially Secured Surety Bonds The…
The Misleading Pretrial Numbers Game How Cashless Bail Supporters Inflate Court Appearance Stats In the heated debate over cashless bail policies, supporters routinely highlight impressive court appearance rates, often claiming 85% to 95% success or higher, as evidence that releasing defendants without money bail or…
Part 3: Dr. Robert Morris Dr. Robert Morris (2013/2014) / Clipper, Morris & Russell-Kaplan (2017) – Dallas County, Texas Pretrial Release Study In Part 3 of our series, The Six Most Significant Bail Studies, we look at a powerful study done in Dallas County, Texas,…
Part 2: Helland & Tabarrok, The Fugitive Evidence on Public Versus Private Law Enforcement from Bail Jumping (2004) In the ongoing debate over bail reform and pretrial release, one question stands out: What actually works best at getting defendants back to court? The second bail…
Part 1: The Cohen & Reaves Study The Most Comprehensive Pretrial Release Analysis Ever Conducted and Why Its Findings Remain Unrivaled Pretrial Release of Felony Defendants in State Courts, 1990–2004 In November 2007, Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) statisticians Thomas H. Cohen, Ph.D., and Brian…
Eroding Accountability: How Bail Reform is Creating a Two-Tiered Justice System Ability-to-pay schemes and equity-driven policies are not making the justice system better but are instead creating a system where some groups of people can commit crimes and other groups can’t. In a functioning criminal…
The Dangerous Myth of “Evidence-Based” Bail Reform: How Three Prominent Studies Collapse Under Real-World Scrutiny For years, bail reform advocates have conducted many high-profile studies and reported them as ironclad proof that eliminating or dramatically weakening surety bail is both safe and effective. Three of…
The “Willful Non-Appearance” Trap: How Bail Reform Activists are Eroding Accountability In the push for bail reform and expanded pretrial release, some jurisdictions have quietly rewritten a core enforcement tool: redefining “failure to appear” (FTA) as “willful non-appearance.” What sounds like a minor semantic tweak—adding…
