Race and the Determinants of Bail, Flight and Bondsmen's Rates

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9310526 WALDFOGEL This project will examine the objectives of the bail system and possible bias in bail by analyzing bail treatment, the likelihood of flight and danger, and bondsmen's rates in Connecticut in the late 1980's and 1990's. It has been difficult to determine whether or not there is race discrimination in the bail system for the reason that bail may be correlated with race because race may be correlated with some legitimate bail determinant. Research cannot conclusively determine whether discrimination is occurring unless the researcher can account for all factors that should affect bail. The project avoids this problem by directly examining measures of flight (and rearrest) risk, the outcome(s) that bail seeks to control. The investigators will then compare the determinants of both flight and rearrest risk. The project will also use data on bondsmen's rates to perform a market-based evaluation of the bail system. The project requires data collection, data manipulation and data analysis. The data will be collected from the Connecticut Judicial Department, the Connecticut Bail Commission and the Connecticut State Police. All of these data will require significant computer programming to become machine readable. The three data sets must also be assembled into a single, coherent data base that will be suitable for the purposes of the study. Extensive statistical analysis will then be required to answer the research questions. ***