Chairman Lathrop, Vice-Chair Pansing-Brooks, and members of the Judiciary Committee, my name is Alan Smith, and I am a senior fellow and Midwest director at the R Street Institute, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy research organization. Our mission is to engage in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government in many areas.
R Street has a robust criminal justice portfolio and staff who have extensively researched the utility, efficacy, expense and innovation around practices of cash bail.[1] [1] We see room for improving the circumstances of pretrial detention for not only the accused, but also the government and the taxpayer in all of those areas as multiple jurisdictions around the nation modernize the system, which has been essentially unchanged for decades and has existed in some form for about 1,500 years.[2] [2]
Thank you for the opportunity to address the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on questions relating to pretrial and bail reform. These are critical questions with significant and far-reaching implications for the civil rights and welfare of millions of Americans, and I am especially thankful that the Commission has chosen to investigate and shine a light on these issues.
My name is Lars Trautman and I am a resident senior fellow of criminal justice and civil liberties policy at the R Street Institute in Washington, D.C. In this role, I study bail and pretrial practices in the United States and advocate for improvements that will create a more equitable, effective and efficient criminal justice system. Earlier in my career, I served as an assistant district attorney in Essex County, Massachusetts. In that capacity, I participated in hundreds of arraignments, gaining firsthand experience with bail determinations as well as insights into some of the system’s flaws.