TY  - BOOK
AU  - Dobbie,Will
AU  - Goldin,Jacob
AU  - Yang,Crystal
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - The Effects of Pre-Trial Detention on Conviction, Future Crime, and Employment: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges 
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2016///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - August 2016; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - Over 20 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States are currently awaiting trial, but little is known about the impact of pre-trial detention on defendants. This paper uses the detention tendencies of quasi-randomly assigned bail judges to estimate the causal effects of pre-trial detention on subsequent defendant outcomes.  Using data from administrative court and tax records, we find that being detained before trial significantly increases the probability of a conviction, primarily through an increase in guilty pleas. Pre-trial detention has no detectable effect on future crime, but decreases pre-trial crime and failures to appear in court. We also find suggestive evidence that pre-trial detention decreases formal sector employment and the receipt of employment- and tax-related government benefits. We argue that these results are consistent with (i) pre-trial detention weakening defendants' bargaining position during plea negotiations, and (ii) a criminal conviction lowering defendants' prospects in the formal labor market
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w22511
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w22511
ER  -