Despite the high-profile status of pretrial bail reform in criminal justice policy discourse, empirical evidence of its impacts remains remarkably sparse—generating uncertainty for policymakers pursuing effective and equitable system reform. Across three studies, this dissertation examines Maryland’s statewide bail reform to evaluate its effects on judicial decision-making and public safety, and to investigate how local court contexts shape pretrial outcomes. In the first study, I employ a regression discontinuity analysis on administrative court records to evaluate how bail reform affects judicial decision-making at the pretrial stage. In the second study, I draw on state-level longitudinal crime data to investigate the impact of bail reform on crime using a synthetic control group approach. In the final study, I integrate administrative court records with data on the organizational, social, and economic contexts of courts in Maryland to describe how pretrial decision-making varies across court jurisdictions and to explore how the social contexts of courts shape responses to new law. This dissertation contributes to an ongoing discourse about the effects and limits of bail reform, and sheds light on the contextual contributors to local variation in pretrial practice. (Publisher abstract provided.)
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