“The roughest form of social work:” How court officials justify bail decisions

Abstract

Growing research has analyzed quantitative patterns of bail decisions and outcomes, but we know far less about how court officials justify their bail decisions. To enhance understanding of how bail decisions—and their resulting pretrial outcomes—are generated, we interviewed 104 judges, prosecutors, and public defenders in a northeastern state. Court officials in our study reported three primary justifications at bail: ensuring defendants return to court, preventing crime, and lessening harm. The first two justifications have been suggested in the literature, but the latter is novel and encompasses two secondary justifications: lessening criminal legal system harm and lessening societal harm. We show how these justifications and the decisions they enable blend risk management with rehabilitation and emerge from court officials’ shared assumption of defendants’ social marginality but varied beliefs about what to do about such marginality pretrial. Each justification allows for distinct, but at times overlapping, bail decisions. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of court official decision-making, research on racial and socioeconomic inequality, and bail reform policy.