“Many states have preventive detention statutes,” said Cherise Fanno Burdeen, the chief executive officer of the Pretrial Justice Institute, an advocacy group that works with communities on effective bail practices. “But they are sorely underused. The systems use work-arounds which unfortunately don’t always work, meaning dangerous people leave jails every day, unsupervised.” Preventive detention statutes emerged from federal legislation called the Bail Reform Act of 1984, which allows a defendant to be held pretrial if he or she is deemed dangerous enough to another person or to a community.
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