Someone from the New York City Criminal Justice Agency, a nonprofit organization, interviews those arrested in the booking cells, gathering criminal histories and basic biographical and employment history to present to the prosecutor, defense lawyer and judge. The prosecutor requests a bail amount, and the judge makes a determination.

Some of those involved in the process take issue with the findings of the report.

Jerome E. McElroy, the executive director of the Criminal Justice Agency, which provided some of the data for the report, said there were complicating factors that the study had not taken into account.

“In many instances,” Mr. McElroy said, “there may be another open case, and that may be why the person is not released on their own recognizance.”

He also said that gathering information about a defendant’s financial situation in a five-minute jail interview was a tall order.

“It is not really possible for us to get reliable information on a person’s financial condition before the arraignment,” Mr. McElroy said. “At the present time, we don’t do that. If we did, by virtue of simply asking the defendant, and the court wanted some further verification of the reliability of the answer given by the defendant, I don’t know how we could do that.”

Melissa C. Jackson, the supervising judge for Manhattan in New York City Criminal Court, said state law already required that judges take into account a defendant’s financial situation when determining bail, and she disagreed with the assertion that judges would set high bail as a form of pretrial sentencing.

“It’s really counterintuitive because those judges are going to be handling the cases all the way through,” she said. “Why would they want a heavier caseload? That to me is a purely political take on what is really a complicated judicial decision.”