On any given day, there are roughly half a million individuals in custody awaiting trial in the United States, nearly double that of any other country. This high rate of pretrial detention has contributed to concerns regarding the effectiveness and constitutionality of the current bail system. In this paper, Will Dobbie of Princeton University and Crystal Yang of Harvard Law School propose two broad sets of policy proposals that can both reduce our nation’s reliance on pretrial detention and improve pretrial decisions.