Giving Compass' Take:

· Dwyer Gunn at Pacific Standard talks about new research from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution that shows that the United States' bail system is costing taxpayers $15 billion per year. The study shows that this is caused by a high number of pre-trial detainees who are unable to afford bail.

· How can the bail systems be improved? What stakeholders need to be brought to the table to begin to create change? 

· Learn about the impacts of unaffordable bail on children. 

About 65 percent of the United States' total jail population are pre-trial detainees who haven't yet been convicted of a crime. While a small percentage of those 460,000 inmates—all of them in county and city jails—are held because a judge concludes they're either a flight or safety risk, the majority are there simply because they lack the financial resources to pay bail.

In recent years, the bail system has been criticized by leaders and advocates across the political spectrum. In a new report from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, researchers Patrick Liu, Ryan Nunn, and Jay Shambaugh provide one more piece of evidence in support for systemic reform: It's costing the United States a lot of money—over $15 billion per year, in fact.

Between 1990 and 2016, the percentage of inmates in jails who hadn't yet been convicted of a crime increased from approximately 50 percent to 65 percent. This trend was accompanied by a significant jump in the proportion of defendants required to post bail in order to be granted a pre-trial release.

Read the full article about the US bail system by Dwyer Gunn at Pacific Standard.