Chairman Lathrop, Vice-Chair Pansing-Brooks, and members of the Judiciary Committee, my name is Alan Smith, and I am a senior fellow and Midwest director at the R Street Institute, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy research organization. Our mission is to engage in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government in many areas. R Street has a robust criminal justice portfolio and staff who have extensively researched the utility, efficacy, expense and innovation around practices of cash bail.[1] [1] We see room for improving the circumstances of pretrial detention for not only the accused, but also the government and the taxpayer in all of those areas as multiple jurisdictions around the nation modernize the system, which has been essentially unchanged for decades and has existed in some form for about 1,500 years.[2] [2]