Cities of Bail visualizes the extent to which people in urban counties mortgage their homes to secure a bail bond, either for themselves or for a loved one. The project maps six diverse cities across the United States to show where and often bail liens were created, satisfied or foreclosed from the year 2000 to the present.

Around sixty to seventy-five percent of those incarcerated in America’s local jails on any given day are unconvicted defendants awaiting trial. Because secured money bail systems remain in standard use across the country, the vast majority of pretrial detainees are detained because they cannot afford to post the amount of bail assigned to their cases. Those who are able to obtain freedom pending trial typically rely on commercial bail bond companies who post bail in exchange for a nonrefundable premium percentage of the total amount in addition to secured collateral like a mortgage on the defendant’s home or the home of their kin.

Every year, the commercial bail industry issues $14 billion in bonds and collects over $2 billion in profits assuring that the criminally accused appear for trial. In many cases the sole alternative to pretrial detention, secured money bail can trap individuals and families in a cycle of debt and collection that leads to the loss of income, child custody, homes, and other property. Even when property is not defaulted, mortgages to secure bail bonds can cloud titles to land and assets for years, harming credit and cutting off access to more productive financial investments.

Users can navigate to any of the six project cities from the landing page to learn more about why each city was included in this study and what it reveals about the commercial bail industry. Map overlays offer demographic information about neighborhoods where bail liens are prevalent as well as criminal charging and other information as available depending on the jurisdiction. The Stories tab [LINK] offers guided narratives through these maps, but readers are also encouraged to explore the connections of interest to them.

All of the data used in Cities of Bail comes from publicly available sources. (Read more about the data collection process.) But individual identifying information is often stored behind many layers of lookups and fee-based retrieval systems, and records concerning the same individual are never aggregated in the public databases as they are here. To protect privacy, Cities of Bail does not make personally identifying information readily available on its public-facing pages. If you are a researcher in need of de-anonymized data, please contact the project director.