At this very moment, nearly 450,000 Americans are sitting in county jails not because they’ve been charged with a crime, but because they simply don’t have enough money to post bail. And, according to a new study, America’s money bail system isn’t just unconstitutional—it’s a fundamental engine of injustice in the United States.

New data published by Columbia University researchersArpit Gupta and Christopher Hansman and Ethan Frenchman from the Maryland Office of the Public Defender suggests that the use of money bail by judges to detain suspects ahead of a formal trial may actually be creating more criminals than it punishes. Analyzing court data from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the researchers found that “the presence of bail money increases the likelihood that a defendant is found guilty by about 12%,” as well as a 6 to 9 percent rise in recidivism in the respective cities.

This all results in a cycle that’s inefficient, potentially harmful to prisoners, and fundamentally burdensome to the U.S. criminal justice system. “Money bail imposes many costs on society — including those stemming from pretrial detention, convictions, and recidivism,” the researchers write, “yet we find no evidence that money bail results in positive outcomes, such as an increase in defendants’ rate of appearance at court.”

[For more of this story, written by Jared Keller, go to https://psmag.com/how-the-mone...3983ed9d9#.bvkir48rv]