New Jersey’s history-making and controversial move away from a cash bail system was expected to lead to fewer people sitting behind bars because they couldn’t afford to pay their way out while awaiting trial.

But a new study released Thursday shows the overhaul led to a major shift in the state’s justice system, with fewer people being arrested for low-level crimes, jail populations that plummeted even more than expected and an increase in defendants set free without conditions such as ankle-bracelet monitoring.

At the same time, state and federal data show a continued decline in crime in New Jersey.

The findings come as court systems around the country consider similar reforms, part of a national movement away from cash bail.

“Many jurisdictions are not going this far,” said Cindy Redcross, one of the lead authors of the study, which was funded by Arnold Ventures, the creator of the risk-assessment tool New Jersey courts use instead of relying on cash bail.

“They’re making small tweaks because they’re afraid of what could happen if they eliminate bail,” said Redcross, the director of the MDRC Center for Criminal Justice Research. “So it’s important that Jersey is doing it and the world hasn’t stopped.”

As New York prepares for its own bail overhaul, law enforcement leaders have expressed grave concerns about public safety and even President Donald Trump weighed in, tweeting that Democratic leaders in the state were “letting out 900 Criminals, some hardened & bad, onto the sidewalks.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, fired back that the New York law, which takes effect in January, is “essentially the same bail reform law New Jersey passed several years ago under Republican Governor Chris Christie,” Trump’s longtime friend and ally.

The political animus mimics what New Jersey saw in the early days of bail reform, with state leaders praising the overhaul and local law enforcement expressing concern about who was being let out until trial.

Among the fiercest critics in its first few months were local elected officials in the state’s urban centers, including Newark and Jersey City, where mayors decried the release of defendants facing gun and domestic violence charges, leading to new guidance for prosecutors. County governments also complained of the financial burdens they faced funding the overhaul.

Additionally, another report from the state judiciary earlier this year found lingering racial disparities in the state’s jails, noting that “an overrepresentation of black males in the pretrial jail population remains an area in need of further examination by New Jersey’s criminal justice system as a whole."

That report also found slight increases in the rate of people charged with new crimes while awaiting trial and the rate of people who failed to show up for court dates, but noted they coincided with an overall decline in New Jersey’s crime rates.

MDRC, a nonpartisan research group, said it will further study the reforms’ effects on defendants by race, how often they show up for court and what the outcomes of their cases are, among other factors.

Justice by algorithm

Under the old system, a judge would look at the charges against a defendant as well as their record and set bail. Now, judges weigh whether to lock somebody up, slap an ankle bracelet on them or release them without conditions with the help of a public safety assessment.

The assessment was created by Arnold Ventures, which funded the MDRC study. The group told NJ Advance Media it analyzed data provided by the state judiciary and provided the news organization with the underlying figures but declined to share the code it used for its analysis.

Such algorithms are increasingly being used across the country as to inform a judge’s decision. Proponents say they level the playing field by giving judges an objective analysis of a defendant’s record. But they have also met criticism that they perpetuate racial bias in the criminal justice system.

Proponents of New Jersey’s system note that unlike similar tools that have drawn scrutiny in other states, the PSA’s “risk factors” and formulas are made public, and judges still have final say over whether to follow the assessment’s guidance.

“No assessment will ever be able to correct for the biases of the policing system and the biases of the data coming out of the criminal justice system,” said James Cadogan, Arnold Ventures’ vice president for criminal justice.

“What we have in the (assessment) is a way to take the same data a judge would see in a court docket and ensure consistency case-to-case in how that data is being used.”

Alexander Shalom, a senior attorney at the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said his group has its own concerns about using algorithms to guide criminal justice decisions. But he also argued that the new system is a vast improvement over a bail-based one that disproportionately hurt poor defendants

“The system we replaced here was an unmitigated civil rights disaster,” he said.

“If we saw that they resulted in some bias in the outcomes, that would be a concern," said Joseph Krakora, the state’s top public defender. “That’s really the test of a risk assessment tool: Is it actually predictive? And so far, it looks like it is.”

The assessment gets used at two points in New Jersey’s justice system: when a police officer is deciding whether to arrest someone on a complaint warrant or simply issue a summons for the person to show up in court, and when prosecutors and judges consider whether defendants should be locked up until trial.

The new report shows that New Jersey police officers and prosecutors significantly changed tactics in response to the overhaul, relying on summonses far more often than they had before.

The report notes that this decline was focused on the least serious charges, including loitering or obscenity, rather than violent crimes and other indictable offenses.

Redcross, one of the study’s authors, said there’s no definitive reason for this decline, but it could be attributed to greater oversight of police by prosecutors and the courts, changes in paperwork requirements resulting from the reforms or even a culture change that resulted from New Jersey doing away with cash bail.

The report notes that it’s “possible that other policy changes,” such as the Newark Police Department’s move away from stop-and-frisk policing tactics, could also have contributed, but that its analysis of historical data strongly suggested bail reform played a major role.

Under the new system, defendants are supposed to get their first hearing within 48 hours, and the report found that the state’s courts were meeting this requirement, with the average hearing happening with an average of 29 hours.

But the courts are falling short on another aim of the reforms, which calls for a detention hearing – a crucial court appearance where defendants learn whether they’ll be locked up until trial ­– within three business days.

The report found those hearings “commonly occur about a week” after the first appearance. The researchers attributed this to “brief adjournments” granted to defense attorneys and prosecutors, often to review evidence in the case, which are permitted under the new law.

Shalom, the ACLU attorney, said speedy trial issues are the likely “next wave of litigation,” as prosecutors and defense attorneys duel over the new court rules still taking shape more than two years later.

“Anyone who looks at what we’ve done in New Jersey and says, ‘Aha, we’ve achieved perfection!’ is nonsensical,” Shalom said. “But we can’t just look at what we’ve got, we’ve got to look at from whence we came.”

S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Disha Raychaudhuri may be reached at disha@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @Disha_RC.

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