ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, “The mechanics of the guilty plea,” seeks to understand why pretrial detention is so strongly correlated with criminal conviction. Using a random sample of criminal court record data from the Cook County Circuit Court, this chapter presents quantitative analyses to show that individuals who are detained pretrial are more likely to be convicted, and then draws on qualitative data from interviews with individuals who pled guilty while detained to shed light on their decision-making process. By drawing on the experiences of individuals who chose to plead guilty despite insisting on their innocence as well as individuals who plead guilty while acknowledging some amount of engagement in illegal activity, this chapter shows how the experience of engaging with the criminal legal process erodes people’s belief that they have any chance of prevailing in court, and how this is exacerbated by their confinement.
In addition, this chapter focuses on the role of pretrial detention in exacerbating negative outcomes for Black defendants relative to defendants from other racial/ethnic groups. Using a series of regressions, this chapter shows how the disproportionate detention of Black defendants, in combination with the negative effect of detention on case outcomes, drives higher rates of conviction for Black defendants.
