LOUISVILLE, KY - Blacks in Jefferson County are more likely than whites to be held in jail until their trials, according to a study released yesterday by a commission that includes judges, attorneys and activists.

But the commission found that factors such as income and community ties, not racial bias, are to blame.

Regardless, commission members said that the county must rethink how it handles bail and other forms of pretrial release so that blacks aren't unfairly penalized.

"This is something that needs to be improved and will be improved," said Jefferson Circuit Judge Denise Clayton, head of the Commission on Racial Fairness, which studied bail in Jefferson County courts.

For the past nine months, the commission has looked into pretrial release, finding that black defendants represent a larger portion of the jail population even though more whites are booked into Louisville Metro Corrections.

"It shows you that the system is still unfair," said the Rev. Louis Coleman, a commission member and activist who has accused the courts of treating blacks unfairly.

But Clayton and other commission members stressed that the reason fewer black defendants are released is not bias by judges or other officials. In fact, the report notes that judges and trial commissioners are not told a defendant's race when they initially set bail.

Instead, the commission found that socio-economic factors such as defendants' income, whether they have a job and their ties to the community often lead to blacks' receiving a different outcome than whites.

"It's not a conscious decision by judges to set bonds higher for African Americans," said Circuit Judge Thomas Wine, a committee member.

The system "needs to be tweaked," he said, so that everyone has the same opportunity for release.

In the 2004-05 fiscal year, whites made up 53 percent of those booked and blacks 43 percent, according to a report Metro Corrections compiled for the commission.

Hispanics and defendants of other races made up the remaining 4 percent.

But a snapshot of one day, Nov. 15, 2005, shows 58 percent of the people in jail to be black and just 40 percent to be white.

During the 2004-05 fiscal year, black men were jailed an average of 24 days between the time they were booked and released compared with 17 days for white men.

The commission made nine recommendations, including encouraging judges to consider a defendant's ability to pay when setting bail.

"For a person who has no resources, a bond of $2,500 may be just as significant as a bond of $50,000 for a person who has means," Clayton said.

The commission also suggests changing the state's risk-assessment system that pretrial services uses to decide whether a defendant should be released without bail pending trial.

For example, a person who has failed to appear for a court hearing and has been issued a bench warrant is highly unlikely to be let out of jail without bail under the current system.

But some of these defendants, Clayton said, are simply unable to appear for court -- maybe because they are in jail in another city -- and shouldn't be punished in their pretrial assessment.

So, instead of issuing a bench warrant, the commission recommends that judges simply issue an order instructing the defendant to appear.

The commission also recommends that a defendant's criminal history be given greater weight when setting bail, depending on the crime and when it occurred, Clayton said.

"If I did something 20 years ago … it may not be as significant as if I had done it two months ago," Clayton said.

Also, the commission recommends that judges use alternatives to incarceration more often, such as home monitoring or having a defendant check in by telephone.

"I wholly agree with that," Coleman said. "There are so many crimes that are not life-threatening where there should be an alternative way to" keep track of defendants.