Pretrial Release in Federal Courts

Pretrial release is the legal process by which defendants who are accused of criminal offenses are released from detention pending trial. Evaluators are frequently concerned with the qualitative and quantuative importance of defendant and offense variables in the determination of which defendants gain release and, for those who are released, which defendants will engage in pretrial misconduct. This article presents a method for deriving unbiased parameter estimates, using maximum likelihood techniques m a structural equation paradigm, for the release decision and indicates how these techniques can be extended to the analysis of pretrial misconduct.