The link between bond forfeiture and pretrial release mechanism: The case of Dallas County, Texas
Open accessAbstract
PURPOSE: The goal of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of four pretrial jail release mechanisms (i.e., bond types) commonly used during the pretrial phase of the criminal justice process in terms of their ability to discriminate between defendants failing to appear in court (i.e., bond forfeiture). These include attorney bonds, cash bonds, commercial bail bonds, and release via a pretrial services agency. METHODS: A multi-treatment propensity score matching protocol was employed to assess between-release-mechanism differences in the conditional probability of failure to appear/bond forfeiture. Data were culled from archival state justice records comprising all defendants booked into the Dallas County, Texas jail during 2008 (n = 29,416). RESULTS: The results suggest that defendants released via commercial bail bonds were less likely to experience failure to appear leading to the bond forfeiture process compared to equivalent defendants released via cash, attorney, and pretrial services bonds. This finding held across different offense categories. The study frames these differences within a discussion encompassing procedural variation within and between each release mechanism, thereby setting the stage for further research and dialog regarding potential justice reform.
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There was no significant relationship between cash bail and FTA.
“Other scholars found no significant relationship between cash bail and FTA (Clipper et al., 2017;Monaghan et al., 2022;Zottola & Desmarais, 2022).”
From A Scoping Review of the Relationships Between Cash Bail, Failure to Appear, Re-Arrest, Health and Well-Being, Race, and Gender (2026) · cites this paper as Clipper et al., 2017
The Results report a statistically significant difference in FTA between cash and commercial bonds among all defendants: commercial-bond defendants had an FTA rate 0.10 lower. They also report a significant cash-bond versus pretrial-services difference for misdemeanors. Thus, the unqualified claim of no significant relationship is contrary to this paper's findings. (LLM, conf=0.90)
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- Authors
- Clipper, S. J., Morris, R. G., & Russell-Kaplan, A.
- Affiliations
- University of Alabama (US)
- The University of Texas at Dallas (US)
- Corresponding author
- Clipper, Stephen J.
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2017-08-17
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- e0182772
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC5560530
- OpenAlex
- W2746958202
- Cited by
- 22
- References
- 28
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 15 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 2
- FWCI
- 2.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Update notices
- expression_of_concern (2020-07-13)
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- University of Texas at Dallas
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
- Social Sciences › Law › Criminal Justice and Penology
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems
- Keywords
- pretrial release, bail bonds, failure to appear, pretrial detention, Dallas County Jail, criminal justice reform
- MeSH terms
- Prisons, Texas, Judicial Role, Law Enforcement
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