When New Jersey overhauled its bail system in 2017 and allowed more people to remain free while awaiting trial, some critics predicted a spike in crime as police were forced to arrest the same individuals over and over.

The bail industry, facing a threat to its bottom line, even seized on one particularly gruesome case — the 2017 killing of a Millville resident allegedly by a man who had been arrested and released under the new law just days earlier — to sue to upend the policy. That lawsuit is pending.

But a new report from the state’s Administrative Office of the Courts says that people released under the new system are no more likely to commit a crime while waiting for their trials than those released under the prior system based on money bail.

All the while, New Jersey’s pretrial jail population continues to plummet, and defendants are showing up for court appearances at roughly the same rate, according to the report released Tuesday.

“Concerns about a possible spike in crime and failures to appear did not materialize,” the report says.

There have been other positive outcomes of the Criminal Justice Reform Act, passed under former Gov. Chris Christie in 2014 and enacted three years later, according to the report. Fewer non-violent offenders are being held in jail while awaiting trial. Cash bail has been almost completely eliminated. And although black defendants remain over-represented in the jail population and continue to be held longer than white defendants, the law has helped shrink some of those racial disparities.

“The over-representation 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,” the report says.

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The Criminal Justice Reform Act came in response to growing awareness nationally about the effects of pretrial detention on poor defendants who were not able to post even small amounts of bail. Besides losing jobs, housing and custody of children, such defendants plead guilty more often, are sentenced to prison more often and receive harsher sentences than those released during the pretrial period.

Since 2017, state courts in New Jersey no longer grant or deny bail based on a person’s ability to pay. Instead, judges in New Jersey conduct individual risk assessments based on suspects’ criminal history and the charges they face before deciding whether to hold them or to release them with or without monitoring until trial.

The 2014 law also included speedy-trial provisions that require criminal cases to proceed to indictment and trial within specific time frames.

The overhaul sparked legal challenges from entities that benefited financially from the old system of money bail. The case stemming from the 2017 killing of the Millville man, Christian Rodgers, has received publicity from reality TV star Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman and funding from a company that offers services to immigrants who need bail.

A Maryland-based bail underwriter funded a separate lawsuit seeking to overturn the new policy. That case ended last year when the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld key provisions of New Jersey's law and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

The report released Tuesday compared aspects of the new and old systems, showing little variation in rates of recidivism and court appearances. In 2017, 13.7 percent of people on pretrial release were charged with another indictable crime, up slightly from 12.7 percent in 2014.

The 89.4 percent of people who showed up for court appearances in 2017 was roughly the same as the 92.7 percent who did so in 2014.

“Because of certain challenges in compiling data from 2014, small changes in outcome measures should be interpreted with caution and likely do not represent meaningful differences,” the report states.

In total, the report said, there were roughly 6,000 fewer people in New Jersey jails on a single day in October 2018 compared with the same day in 2012, a decrease of about 40 percent. That included about 3,000 fewer black defendants, 1,500 fewer white defendants and 1,300 fewer Hispanic defendants.

People being held in county jails under federal contracts, such as immigration detainees housed in Bergen, Hudson and Essex counties, were not counted in the statistics.

Email: pugliese@northjersey.com