"A growing movement questions the practice of requiring defendants to post monetary bail to ensure that they appear at their court hearings...."

"Many of those jurisdictions now use risk assessments to decide whether to detain defendants or release them without a monetary requirement. Those tools, which consider previous offenses and the defendant’s likelihood of being a flight risk, are themselves controversial: Some advocates have expressed concern that racial and socioeconomic biases are baked into them. Bail-change advocates argue that court systems should err on the side of releasing defendants, who are presumed innocent. [Alexa Van Brunt, director of the MacArthur Justice Center Clinic at Northwestern University] said pretrial detention increases a person’s likelihood of committing another crime by stripping them of jobs, educational opportunities or custody of their children. Defendants who are held are more likely to plead guilty, even if they did not commit the offense, Van Brunt said, because they want to get out of jail."

From "The Wisconsin parade suspect was accused of a car attack weeks ago. Here’s why he was out on bail" (WaPo).

ADDED: I'm reading the comments over there. There's this — which begins with a quote from the article — from Gibbering:

He was also convicted of a sex crime in Nevada after impregnating a minor, officials say.

That’s called rape, WaPo. Thanks for demonstrating this whole problem. Crimes against women don’t count. Rape them, hit them with cars, neglect support payments, strangle them, abuse them, rob them, whatever. Doesn’t matter. It almost never matters.

AND: Here's the NYT approach to the same material: "Waukesha Suspect’s Previous Release Agitates Efforts to Overhaul Bail/Darrell Brooks, accused of plowing his S.U.V. through a Wisconsin parade, had been freed on $1,000 bail for a different charge in Milwaukee County, where there is a backlog of cases":

The bail decision has brought criticism raining down on Milwaukee County’s district attorney, John T. Chisholm, a Democrat who has tried to reduce high rates of incarceration and racial disparities in the justice system. Longtime critics, led by Wisconsin’s previous governor, Scott Walker, blamed Mr. Brooks’s release on Mr. Chisholm’s “radical” liberal ideology.

It appears, though, that the controversial release may have been not a policy decision, but the result of happenstance and other factors — an inexperienced junior prosecutor and a rushed supervisor up against a huge backlog of cases that piled up during the coronavirus pandemic, according to court documents and interviews with judges, prosecutors, local officials and defense lawyers....

Each defendant is screened by a pretrial risk assessment that uses nine data points, including age and prior convictions, to rate the defendant’s risk of failing to appear in court and of committing a new crime. Judges or court commissioners receive the risk score, along with recommendations by the defense and the prosecution, before setting the amount of bond and the release conditions, which can range from very little supervision for low-risk defendants to weekly check-ins and GPS monitoring.

The risk assessment is not a matter of public record, but someone with Mr. Brooks’s history would almost certainly have been rated a six out of six and flagged as a high risk for violence, several lawyers said.... 

“This could be a huge blow to our work in making the system more equitable,” said David Bowen, a Wisconsin state representative whose district includes several predominantly Black neighborhoods in Milwaukee. “The narrative gaining traction in white suburban communities now is all about being tough on crime.”