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Bail is money or a bond paid to the court to allow a person charged with a crime to be released from jail while waiting for their trial. It acts as a guarantee that the person will return for their court dates. If they fail to appear, they can lose the bail money and may be arrested again.

For minor crimes, bail amounts are often set in advance by a bail schedule, meaning the person can pay and be released quickly without waiting for a judge. For more serious offenses, bail is decided at a court hearing (arraignment), where a judge considers factors like the severity of the crime, the person's criminal record, and whether they might flee or pose a danger to others.

There are different types of bail. Cash bail is when the full amount is paid upfront. If the person attends all court dates, they may get most of the money back. Bail bonds are used when the person can’t afford bail; they pay a fee to a bail bond company, which covers the rest, but the fee is non-refundable. Personal recognizance is when a judge allows release without payment, based on trust that the person will return.

Bail helps prevent unnecessary jail time before trial, but critics argue it unfairly affects low-income individuals who can’t afford to pay. Some areas are reforming or eliminating cash bail to create a system based less around the financial wealth of individuals.

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  • document cover for Money as a Criminal Justice Stakeholder: The Judge's Decision to Release or Detain a Defendant Pretrial
    Accession Number
    029517

    "The future of pretrial justice in America will come partly from our deliberative focus on our judges’ decisions to release or detain a criminal defendant pretrial and from our questioning of whether our current constitutional and statutory bail schemes are either helping or hindering those decisions ... we recognize that we also need a fair and transparent scheme allowing the preventive detention of higher risk defendants without "bail," or judges will continue to be forced to use money to accomplish the same thing, albeit unfairly, non-transparently, and, some would say, unlawfully. A new group of people are now telling us that we can never change our constitution to allow the creation of this scheme, but the fact is that change is inevitable.