Abstract:

Research Summary: Federal pretrial services and probation officers assess defendants and make influential recommendations that defendants be either released or detained, based on their threat to community safety and risk of flight. To inform efforts to reduce disparities in pretrial detention, we examined officers’ decision-making about 149,815 defendants across 81 districts. Overall, the probability of a detention recommendation was 34% higher for Black than White defendants. Racial disparities were most pronounced in districts with low detention rates and high structural inequality, and in ambiguous cases that invoked substantial officer discretion. Mediation analyses indicated that up to 79% of the racial disparity in detention recommendations operates through institutionalized factors (i.e., pretrial policy) rather than personally mediated factors (e.g., implicit racism or classism). The lion’s share of the disparity operates through one factor: criminal history.

Policy Implications: This study illustrates an empirical strategy for understanding the pathways through which disparities operate, which is crucial for shaping effective solutions. Providing officers with training and decision guides for high discretion cases could reduce personally mediated bias, but this study shows that disparities mostly flow through institutionalized bias. So, greater gains may be had by making strategic shifts in proximal policies and their implementation. One promising direction is to corral criminal history by adopting a tight definition that demonstrably predicts violence and failure to appear, and limiting the weight assigned to criminal history versus other predictive factors, when making recommendations. Another promising direction is to adopt risk-based release policies that leverage an existing tool to reduce both detention rates and racial disparities.

Keywords: pretrial detention, race, disparity, decision-making, probation, bias