Cash Bail and Trial Outcomes in an Early Twentieth-Century Southern Police Court

Studies of modern misdemeanor adjudication find that courts set bail higher than is required to reasonably assure that nonviolent defendants who pose no immediate threat to the community will appear for trial. Some defendants languish in jail for extended periods during which time they lose income, employment, and the ability to provide an effective defense for themselves. This paper considers the downstream consequences of bail setting in an urban, southern police court in the 1910s. I find that defendants unwilling or unable to post cash bail were not more likely to be convicted or to be incarcerated than defendants who posted bail. Conditional on conviction, however, defendants who posted bail and returned for their hearings were about half as likely to serve time. Among those who served time, defendants who posted bail served just 6 percent as much time as defendants who did not post bail. The ability to post bail was correlated with unobserved income or wealth and I find evidence that defendants who did not post bail and served on the chain gang were employed in low-income jobs and likely faced a binding cash-in-advance constraint.