{"id":36758,"date":"2023-01-30T06:24:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-30T06:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/30\/other-states-could-provide-preview-of-end-of-cash-bail\/"},"modified":"2023-01-30T06:24:00","modified_gmt":"2023-01-30T06:24:00","slug":"other-states-could-provide-preview-of-end-of-cash-bail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/30\/other-states-could-provide-preview-of-end-of-cash-bail\/","title":{"rendered":"Other states could provide preview of end of cash bail"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Illinois was hours away from becoming the first state in the nation to fully abolish cash bail from most of its courtrooms when the Illinois Supreme Court slammed the brakes on it last week, throwing the controversial new law into doubt while the high court weighs its constitutionality.<\/p>\n

The delay came days after a Kankakee County circuit judge ruled that individual county court systems may ignore the new policy if they choose. Opponents of the bail reform law, like Illinois Republican Party chairman Don Tracy, celebrated the last-minute roadblock for the 2021 Pretrial Fairness Act.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThis law would have severely limited the ability of judges and prosecutors to keep dangerous criminals off of the streets thereby exporting the epidemic of lawlessness we\u2019ve seen in certain parts of Chicago throughout the rest of our state,\u201d Tracy wrote in a statement after the local judge\u2019s ruling last week.<\/p>\n

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Academic and judicial reviews of similar bail reform efforts from across the country \u2014 including in Cook County \u2014 suggest Tracy\u2019s prediction is off. Varying efforts to roll back the use of cash bail in different states have so far led to consistent results, including lower jail populations, low re-offense rates for people released on bond and less jail time for people accused of low-level crimes.<\/p>\n

However, reforms have also swelled the numbers of detainees who are held on electronic monitoring and other forms of supervision, and racial disparities in incarceration have held steady or even hardened in jurisdictions with bail rollbacks. Every reform effort was also met with a swift and intense political backlash \u2014 sometimes catastrophically for the law.<\/p>\n

\u2018A model for other states\u2019<\/h2>\n

New Jersey jumped to the vanguard of bail reform in 2014 with a sweeping bipartisan law that nearly eliminated cash bail, pushing judges to use it only in rare cases.<\/p>\n

The law required the state\u2019s supreme court to report annually on the impact of the policy, which went into full effect in 2017, and the most recent report showed stark results. By October 2021, just 0.4% of the state\u2019s jail defendants were held on bail of $2,500 or less, compared to 12% at the same point in 2012.<\/p>\n

The Garden State\u2019s bail reform coincided with a sharp drop in the state\u2019s pretrial jail population, from more than 15,000 detainees in 2012 to fewer than 8,000 in 2019. By 2021, defendants with violent charges made up about 55% of the state\u2019s jail detainees, up from 47% in 2018.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the percentage of defendants who were charged with serious crimes while out on pretrial release did not budge from 2017 to 2019, holding at 13.7%. The proportion of re-offenders soared past 20% in 2020, however, coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic and a nationwide spike in crime.<\/p>\n

The proportion of New Jersey defendants charged with less serious \u201cdisorderly person\u201d offenses while on release sank steadily, even through the pandemic, declining from 13.2% in 2017 to 11.4% in 2020. And court appearance rates defied expectations by shooting upward from about 89% in 2017 to 97% in 2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cThrough its four years of existence, criminal justice reform in New Jersey has performed admirably and with consistency,\u201d New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner wrote in a letter accompanying the report. \u201cIt remains a model for other states to consider, even as it continues to confront the challenges ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the same results have been seen in other states whose leaders have enacted major bail reform laws.<\/p>\n

A December report from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice found a 34% decline in New York state\u2019s jail population tied to that state\u2019s adoption of a 2019 law that eliminated cash bail for most non-violent offenses. Researchers also found no direct impact on crime or recidivism, pointing to a modest decline in non-violent crime in New York while violent crime rose apace with national averages.<\/p>\n

The trend is not limited to urban blue states. Recidivism declined in Harris County, Texas, after the county implemented bail reform for misdemeanor crimes in 2017, according to an August 2022 University of Pennsylvania report. And Alaska\u2019s 2016 bail reform correlated with a nearly 20% drop in its jail populations with no corresponding spike in crime, the Alaska Criminal Justice Commission found in a 2019 report.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Studies traced similar trends from an administrative bail reform effort undertaken by Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans in 2018. Even as police leaders railed against the policy by pointing to examples of detainees who committed new crimes while released on bail, advocates cited a Loyola University study and official county reports that found the same aggregate impacts as elsewhere: declines in the jail population and unchanged levels of recidivism.<\/p>\n

The mounting case studies combine for \u201cextremely good evidence\u201d that bail reform works, according to Sarah Staudt, policy director for the Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and a member of the coalition that lobbied for the Pretrial Fairness Act.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that the vast majority of people released pre-trial are going to be successful, and only a tiny, tiny minority are going to be re-arrested for a violent crime,\u201d Staudt said. \u201cPeople released pre-trial are not driving violent crime . . . there\u2019s lots of evidence that isn\u2019t the case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Limitations to reforms<\/h2>\n

Many of the same reports that showed promising trends following local bail reform efforts also highlighted some common shortcomings, especially when the reform laws are measured up against their goals of breaking down racial disparities in the criminal legal system and limiting low-level criminals\u2019 contact with courts.<\/p>\n

Last year\u2019s judicial report on New Jersey\u2019s bail reform law showed a steady increase in the proportion of that state\u2019s jail population that is Black, from 54% to 60%. It also found that law enforcement agencies remain far more likely to refer Black arrestees to judges for possible detention than white arrestees, whom police more often released with court summonses.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the John Jay College report found that judges were more likely to remand Black defendants to jail than their white counterparts, and Black defendants eligible for cash bail generally had their rates set higher.<\/p>\n

New York also marked a decline in pre-trial defendants released from jail without conditions, coinciding with a sharp increase in electronic monitoring and other forms of pre-trial supervision.<\/p>\n

Reform advocates have flagged a potential increase in supervised release as a potential unwanted side effect of bail reform, saying ankle monitors and other forms of surveillance are often overly restrictive and counterproductive.<\/p>\n