A Reagan-era law, passed by Congress nearly four decades ago to change the federal bail system in order to address concerns over rising crime committed by arrestees released pending trial, has been wildly misunderstood and misapplied by the federal court system's magistrate judges, prosecutors, public defenders and probation officers, a new two-year national study finds. (article available here).
The unprecedented look at federal pretrial detention conducted by the University of Chicago Law School's Federal Criminal Justice Clinic paints a portrait of a judicial system that has violated the rights of especially poor arrestees and people of color.
Such systemic problems are largely the result of what judges and advocates told USA TODAY is a poorly-written, war-on-drugs-era statute known as the Bail Reform Act of 1984, an over reliance on prosecutorial discretion, and risk-averse magistrate judges and federal defense professionals.
According to the report, in 1983, less than 24% of arrestees were jailed pretrial. By 2019, nearly 75% of them were.
Federal pretrial jailing cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars per arrestee per year or an estimated more than $1 billion per year according to the report. Prior research cited in the report also has shown that jailing has a cascading effect on an arrestee's life from even just a few days behind bars, which may cost them their job, custody of their child, and even impact their housing, as well as make it more likely an arrestee is convicted, sentenced to a longer term and faces mandatory minimums.
Federal data shows that even when judges released arrestees at higher rates, failure-to-appear and rearrest rates remained steady at about 1 to 2%.
"Part of what's happening and why people are being locked in jail at really high rates is people aren't paying attention to what the law requires," said Alison Siegler, the report's lead author and a University of Chicago Law School clinical professor who is the clinic's founding director.
She said many judges she's spoken to are "surprised and horrified that the in-court practice has gotten so attenuated from what the legal requirements are. The courtroom process is untethered from what the law demands."