When individuals are arrested or indicted for a crime, governments have legitimate interests in assuring that those individuals show up for future legal proceedings and also do not cause more social harm in the meanwhile. To serve those legitimate interests, governments may restrain the personal liberty of those presumptively innocent individuals—traditionally accomplished either by incarceration or by release subject to certain sureties and conditions. The choice, in short, is between jail and bail.

Currently, governments skew that choice by subsidizing the costs of jail but not bail. The result—wholly predictable given the size and asymmetric nature of the subsidy—is that the United States maintains an inefficiently large jail population that both costs taxpayers too much and excessively limits the liberty of too many. Prior commentators and reformers have correctly identified the overuse of pretrial detention in jails as a major public policy crisis and have urged substantial reforms to current bail processes up to and including the abolition of state constitutional rights to bail (as one state has recently done). We believe that the hostility toward bail overlooks the root cause of the problem, which is the asymmetric subsidization of jail over bail. We propose a balanced subsidization system that can preserve the beneficial aspects of a traditional bail surety system while (i) reducing unnecessary and inefficient restraints on individual liberty, (ii) addressing the distributional inequities of current practices, and (iii) saving taxpayers billions of dollars per year.

当个人因犯罪而被捕或被起诉时，政府有正当利益确保这些人出现在未来的法律诉讼中，同时不会造成更多的社会危害。为了满足这些合法利益，政府可能会限制那些推定无辜的个人的人身自由——传统上通过监禁或在某些保证和条件下释放来实现。简而言之，选择是在监狱和保释之间。

目前，政府通过补贴监狱费用而不是保释金来扭曲这种选择。结果——考虑到补贴的规模和不对称性质，完全可以预见——美国维持着大量低效的监狱人口，这既让纳税人付出了太多代价，又过度限制了太多人的自由。先前的评论家和改革者正确地将监狱中过度使用审前拘留视为重大的公共政策危机，并敦促对当前的保释程序进行实质性改革，包括取消州宪法规定的保释权（正如一个州最近所做的那样）。我们认为，对保释的敌意忽视了问题的根本原因，即监狱对保释的不对称补贴。