No Money Bail, No Problems? Evidence from an Automatic Release Program

By Alex Albrigh

Are the effects of money bail on misconduct large enough to justify its costs? Money bail advocates argue that its usage is critical for averting misconduct, while skeptics counter that its effects are small and not worth the consequent human costs of pretrial detention. I address this debate directly by using administrative data and a policy reform in Kentucky. An automatic release program removed financial bail conditions for a subset of low-level cases, creating an opportunity to estimate the program’s effects on detention and misconduct using a differences-in-differences approach. The program cut the usage of financial bail by 50.5 p.p., while it increased the rate of failure to appear by 3.3 p.p. The program’s effect on pretrial rearrest is indistinguishable from zero, and the data rules out even modest sized increases. Effects on misconduct are primarily driven by substitution away from money bail, rather than from unsecured bail (which only requires payment in the event of misconduct). …

Unpublished paper, 2021. 61p.