The criminal legal system came shortly after the Revolutionary War when American citizens requested guaranteed rights. The founders who designed these rights also enforced cash bail which has evidently remained in the modern legal system. Originating in Europe many centuries before the Republic, the practice of money bail offered an alternative to vengeful blood feuds. The continued use of cash bail has corrupted the system from within—steering it far from a mere incentive to return for a trial. Evidently, cash bail creates a two-tiered system of justice that is dependent on one’s financial status. Interestingly, According to American Bar Association, judges often set higher rates and higher amounts of cash bail for people of color, particularly Black people, than white people.

Today, plea bargains constitute 95% of criminal convictions. However, plea bargaining did not enter the consciousness of the American legal profession as a normal practice. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, it became normal in the four decades following its discovery in the 1920s. But how did the judgment of the legal profession change so dramatically in a relatively short period of time? Now, even the Supreme Court declared that the normalization of plea bargaining has an enormously consequential chapter in the broader story of American criminal justice. One theory to explain the normalization of pleas was the result of rising caseload numbers, increasing “caseload pressure” to process more cases. In an era where America’s incarceration rates are at an all-time high, plea bargaining has embraced this trend and risen immensely.