A significant share of the people held in prison anywhere have not been of anything.
They are awaiting trial, and in several systems they wait longer than the sentence the charge carries.
is justified on three grounds: flight, with witnesses and further offences.
Each is a prediction about the future, and predictions of rare events are unreliable by construction.
Judges are nonetheless required to make them in a few minutes with limited information.
The asymmetry of consequences shapes the decision in a direction nobody states aloud.
A released who reoffends is a public event with a name attached; a detained unnecessarily is a statistic.
Detention has effects that the decision rarely weighs.
A person held for three months loses a job, frequently a home and sometimes the custody of children.
Studies controlling for the strength of the case find that detained s are more likely to and receive longer sentences.
The pressure is straightforward: a guilty plea may produce release today, while maintaining innocence produces another three months inside.
systems that require money convert this into a question of income.
Two s with identical cases are released or detained according to what their families can raise in a weekend.
Jurisdictions that abolished money bail and replaced it with report similar appearance rates at trial.
Text message reminders alone raise appearance measurably, which suggests that much of what was called flight was disorganisation.
Time limits are the instrument that works where judicial culture resists the rest.
A maximum forces the system to organise around the rather than around its own calendar.
Where such limits exist and are enforced, the average wait falls without any change in the rate of conviction.