Most people in local jails have not been convicted of anything. What that costs taxpayers, what it costs the people held, and what courts are doing about it.
Most people in local jails in the United States have not been convicted of the charge they are being held on. They are waiting for trial, and a large share of them are there because they could not post bond or could not pay for the supervision the court would have accepted instead. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has reported that roughly two thirds of the local jail population is unconvicted, and that nearly all of the growth in jail population over the last two decades came from people awaiting trial.
Holding a person in jail costs the county or the state on the order of $90 to $120 a day, depending on the jurisdiction. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of people held on any given day and pretrial detention becomes a multi-billion-dollar line item that most taxpayers have never seen broken out.
The cost of a missed court date is part of the same ledger. A randomized trial published in Science Advances in 2025 put the system cost of a failure to appear at about $2,850, against about $10 to prevent one with an automated reminder. The same trial found reminders cut warrants for missed court dates by about 20%.
The person held pays the rest. Even a short stay in jail can mean a lost job, a lost apartment, and a family disrupted. Research on low-risk people awaiting trial has found that being held even a week or two, rather than released within a day, is associated with a higher likelihood of a new offense after the case ends. Communities absorb that too, in the form of people returning to the same neighborhoods with less stability than they left with.
Pretrial diversion and supervised release programs give a judge a middle option between a cash bond and a cell: drug courts, mental health courts, veterans treatment courts, and supervised pretrial release with conditions. The programs work when the court can see whether conditions are being met without putting a person on hardware they cannot afford.
One large Missouri county built its pretrial release program on RePath in January 2020. In the first year, pretrial jail days fell by more than 60%: about 150,000 jail days, roughly 400 fewer people in jail on any given day, and $3.9 million less in state jail reimbursement. Comparing the three fiscal years before the program with the six since, state pretrial reimbursements to the county are down 31%. Across Missouri, counties that do not use RePath bill the state 58% more per resident for pretrial detention than counties that do.
A rural Missouri circuit tells the same story at a smaller scale. After bond reform required it to release people it had no money to supervise, it built its pretrial program around RePath and took a 55-bed jail from 64 people to 33.
The costs of pretrial incarceration are large, well documented, and mostly avoidable for the people a judge has already decided can go home. The programs that bring them down share one feature: a supervision option the person can meet and the court can defend. The two case studies above are on A large Missouri county and the a rural Missouri circuit.
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