Time to Bail out: Examining Gender Differences in the Length of Pretrial Detention Using Survival Analysis

Abstract

Sixty-six percent of the total U.S. jailed population (over 400,000 people) are being held in pretrial detention, not convicted of any crime. Most remain in jail simply because neither they nor their families can afford the bail that a judge has assigned to them. Previous research shows that the assignment of bail is both biased and that being detained in jail negatively impacts later justice outcomes. Women, in general, have been more adversely affected in this area due to their overall fewer social and economic resources compared to men. A sample of 150 women and 150 men was used to compare how gender impacted the length of time it took defendants to bail out of a rural county jail in the southeastern U.S. Using previous literature, pathways theory, and the theoretical lens of an architecture of gendered violence, the authors tested for gendered differences in how quickly women and men posted bail once in pretrial detention. A combination of a Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional multiple-regression analysis indicated that women took significantly longer than men to post bail, while controlling for bail amount, age, and race. Implications for policy and research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• bail
• pretrial detention
• survival analysis

Disclosure statement

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1 Increasingly some counties will also use pretrial release assessment instruments that may account for things such as psychological factors, however this is not uniform (Ottone and Scott-Hayward 2018).

2 Given ethical considerations and restrictions associated with the Internal Review Board (IRB) process, the name of the state and county that the data come from are not used.

3 The sample was first stratified on sex and a random sample of males and females was then selected from each group respectively.

4 Given sample proportions, women would require a weight over 2, commonly considered inappropriate.