In this article, we review a growing empirical literature on the effectiveness and fairness of the US pretrial system and discuss its policy implications. Despite the importance of this stage of the criminal legal process, researchers have only recently begun to explore how the pretrial system balances individual rights and public interests. We describe the empirical challenges that have prevented progress in this area and how recent work has made use of new data sources and quasi-experimental approaches to credibly estimate both the individual harms (such as loss of employment or government assistance) and public benefits (such as preventing non-appearance at court and new crimes) of cash bail and pretrial detention. These new data and approaches show that the current pretrial system imposes substantial short-and long-term economic harms on detained defendants in terms of lost earnings and government assistance, while providing little in the way of decreased criminal activity for the public interest. Non-appearances at court do significantly decrease for detained defendants, but the magnitudes cannot justify the economic harms to individuals observed in the data. A second set of studies shows that that the costs of cash bail and pretrial detention are disproportionately borne by Black and Hispanic individuals, giving rise to large and unfair racial differences in cash bail and detention that cannot be explained by underlying differences in pretrial misconduct risk. We then turn to policy implications and describe areas of future work that would enable a deeper understanding of what drives these undesirable outcomes.

中文翻译：

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美国审前制度：平衡个人权利与公共利益

在本文中，我们回顾了越来越多关于美国预审制度的有效性和公平性的实证文献，并讨论了其政策含义。尽管刑事法律程序的这一阶段很重要，但研究人员直到最近才开始探索审前制度如何平衡个人权利和公共利益。我们描述了阻碍该领域取得进展的经验挑战，以及最近的工作如何利用新的数据源和准实验方法来可信地估计个人危害（如失业或政府援助）和公共利益（如以防止未出庭和新犯罪）现金保释和审前拘留。这些新的数据和方法表明，目前的审前制度在收入损失和政府援助方面对被拘留的被告造成了重大的短期和长期经济损害，同时几乎没有为公共利益减少犯罪活动。被拘留的被告出庭的次数确实显着减少，但其幅度并不能证明数据中观察到的对个人的经济损害是合理的。第二组研究表明，现金保释和审前拘留的费用不成比例地由黑人和西班牙裔个人承担，导致现金保释和拘留方面存在巨大且不公平的种族差异，这无法用审前不当行为风险的潜在差异来解释。