, primarily through an increase in guilty pleas. Pre-trial detention has no detectable effect on future crime, but decreases pre …-trial crime and failures to appear in court. We also find suggestive evidence that pre-trial detention decreases formal sector …

penalty to the severity of the crime. We combine individual-level data on sentence length for a representative sample of US … inmates with proxies for maximum punishment and monitoring costs across US states over 50 years. Consistent with the theory of …