From a public policy perspective, research suggests that the economic and emotional consequences of being jailed for bail leave people more desperate and unstable than they would have otherwise been, and may actually lead to more, not less crime.

Chicago native Flo, who asked to be identified by his abbreviated name out of concern about finding work, knows those consequences well. After a 2016 arrest for a burglary he attributed to a gambling addiction, he spent about two months in jail, unable to come up with the $7,500 in cash for his bail. He was released after the Chicago Community Bond Fund (CCBF), a nonprofit that raises money to pay bail for defendants, tossed him a lifeline and paid his.

“Jail takes a toll,” Flo said. “The turnout of your case can be dramatically different because you're under pressure. And when you go to court, you’re ready to ‘jump out of the window’ as they say,” and take any plea deal just to go free.

If Flo hadn’t gotten that bail, he wouldn’t have been able to help his wife move when the couple were kicked out of their home; he would have been forced to make court appearances in an orange jumpsuit and shackles rather than a suit and tie. He kept working odd jobs in warehouses and construction, rather than staying in jail and costing taxpayers money. He eventually took a plea deal and served two years after credit for good behavior. If Flo had remained in jail awaiting trial, the data suggests he might also have received a longer sentence: Researchers have found that pretrial detainees have a lot less leverage in bargaining with prosecutors when they are in custody versus out of it.

There are more than 700,000 people in U.S. jails around the country, and about two thirds of them have not yet been convicted of a crime.

When it comes to the number of people in local jails, bail isn’t just a side issue: It’s the main driver. There are typically more than 700,000 people in U.S. jails, and about two thirds of them have not yet been convicted of a crime and are there mostly because they couldn’t make bail. It’s an expensive policy: According to a 2014 Brookings Institution study, local corrections systems cost taxpayers at least $22 billion a year. And these numbers are completely separate from people serving sentences in prisons.

On these moral and public policy grounds, activist groups and legislators in many parts of the country have been pushing to eliminate cash bail entirely. Some seek to replace it with algorithmic risk assessments, electronic monitoring and other technical innovations. Many just want to see as many people released pretrial as possible, and think the criminal justice system shouldn’t try to predict what people who are presumed innocent are or are not likely to do if released. Virtually all reform advocates seek to release defendants on the “least restrictive possible means” that ensure they show up for court—sometimes simply a signed promise that they will. Dozens of nonprofits have popped up to pay money bonds on behalf of pretrial defendants in a push to empty jails.

Few efforts represented as sweeping a change as New York’s reform. The law, which passed in April 2019, limited the number of crimes for which judges could set bail, mostly to violent felonies. Almost everyone else—those who make up 90 percent of arrests in the state—could walk free while they waited for their trial date, though judges could impose strict monitoring conditions. For the first three months the law was in effect, from January through March, New York’s jail population dropped sharply: At the end of 2019, the jail population across the state was close to 20,000; for the first three months of 2020, it was around 15,000 and continuing to shrink.

There are around 700,000 people in U.S. jails, and two-thirds of them have not been convicted of a crime. | Top: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; bottom: Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

And then came news of a crime spike. A number of hate crimes had shaken New York over the holidays, including a woman who was arrested three times for assaulting Orthodox Jewish women in one week in Brooklyn; outlets noted that she had been released from jail under the state’s new bail reform laws. In early March, the NYPD released a report showing that crime in February 2020 was up 22.5 percent compared with February 2019. In the report, the department explicitly blamed the uptick on criminal justice reforms, including the bail reform law. According to the department, in the first two months of the year, 482 people who had been arrested on charges where cash bail was prohibited went on to commit 846 new crimes.

The reported spike got wall-to-wall coverage in New York’s tabloids, with headlines like “No Bail Madness” and “Revolving Door Lunacy.” Legal aid groups disputed those numbers, pointing out that arraignments—the court appearances where bail is generally set—were down 20 percent at the same time, and suggested that perhaps officers were making bad arrests to make the stats look bad and that prosecutors had to ultimately toss out those charges.

Politically, though, the damage was done. Prosecutors joined the police in blaming bail reform, and the governor, who had supported the measure, vowed not to sign any 2020 budget that didn’t reform the reforms. Dermot Shea, the New York City police commissioner, took to the New York Times with an op-ed headlined “New York’s New Bail Laws Harm Public Safety.” The Senate minority leader in New York, John J. Flanagan of Long Island, issued frequent news releases, connecting grisly crimes to recent reforms.

Bail advocates were furious. As they saw it, the policy hadn’t been in place long enough to know what the impact on crime—or anything else—might be. “If we had been able to give those changes time and space to take hold, I’m very confident that we would have seen how right we were,” said Scott Hechinger, a New York bail reform advocate. “The problem was, we didn’t have patience.” Instead, by Hechinger’s read, fearmongering took over. Under the old system those same individuals could, and sometimes did make bail, get out, and commit a new crime—but news reports did not routinely highlight such cases. According to an analysis by a pair of City Council members in Queens, people released under the new law made up, at most, 7 percent of the increase in the crime rate. A group of 45 law professors signed a letter to the New York Press Club calling on the city’s media to provide “accurate and objective context” in coverage of criminal justice reforms, saying the stories were designed to stoke panic and calling them “Willie Horton-like claims.”

But these advocates couldn’t stop the rollback. In early April, the Legislature amended the bail reform law with a number of changes set to take effect in July. The changes expand the number of crimes for which judges can set bail to include burglary, vehicular assault and sex trafficking, among others, and crimes committed by a “persistent felony offender.” And while advocates were crushed by the setback, the move was still insufficient for the most fervent opponents of the law. “This approach does not come close to addressing the problems w/ the law. What about serious offenses that didn't make the cut?” the Police Benevolent Association, a union for NYPD officers, tweeted in response to the changes in early April.

In other states, some of which had seen years of groundwork on new bail laws, reform advocates watched this backlash and snapped to attention.

Colorado is one state where the lessons of New York could reshape the bail debate. Governor Jared Polis recently told a justice system forum that he would “like to see Colorado lead the nation in criminal-justice reform,” and in 2019, state lawmakers considered dozens of crime and justice bills—more than some lawmakers said they’d seen in any single legislative session.