The US prison population stands at 1.43 million persons, with an additional 740,000
persons in local jails. Nearly all will eventually return to society. This review examines the …

Although jails are both common and consequential, affecting millions of individuals
annually, they are a relatively understudied aspect of the criminal justice system. In this …

Can machine learning improve human decision making? Bail decisions provide a good test
case. Millions of times each year, judges make jail-or-release decisions that hinge on a …

In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce
innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error …

We report novel empirical estimates of the race-specific effects of larger police forces in the
United States. Each additional police officer abates approximately 0.1 homicides. In per …

This article uses a natural experiment to analyze whether incarceration during the pretrial
period affects case outcomes. In Philadelphia, defendants randomly receive bail magistrates …

We formalize predictive optimization, a category of decision-making algorithms that use
machine learning (ML) to predict future outcomes of interest about individuals. For example …

Abstract In the United States, over 400,000 individuals are in jail daily waiting for their
criminal cases to be resolved. The majority of detainees are held because they cannot post …

Over 20 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States are currently awaiting trial,
but little is known about the impact of pretrial detention on defendants. This paper uses the …

Actuarial risk assessments are frequently touted as a neutral way to counteract implicit bias
and increase the fairness of decisions made at almost every juncture of the criminal justice …