Remember back when politicians were touting the success of bail reform? Remember the meaningless and deceptive numbers they threw around?
NYC Comptroller Brad Lander claimed in a report that only 1% of people released on bail under bail reform are rearrested for a violent felony while their case is pending.
State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said the number was 2%.
Remember how the news media and progressive politicians repeated those numbers and claimed that bail reform was a success and had no impact on crime, even as crime rose 30-40% after bail reform took effect?
Well, a new study of bail reform outside New York City — suburbs and upstate — prepared by John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Data Collaborative for Justice shows that 66% of the people released under bail reform who had a recent prior arrest were re-arrested within two years of their release.
The DCJ study also showed that 67% of defendants who had a recent prior violent felony arrest in the past year who were released under bail reform were re-arrested within two years of their arraignment.
Almost half — 49% — were rearrested for a felony.
The fact that a study shows that people who have committed crimes tend to continue to commit more crimes is not really surprising.
My analysis of bail reform published by the Manhattan Institute in August of 2022 showed NYC re-arrest rates of close to 70% for people with prior records charged with larceny, burglary, robbery, and criminal contempt while their case was pending.
But DCJ is no conservative think tank. On the contrary, they have been vocal supporters of, and cheerleaders for, New York’s disastrous bail reform laws from the beginning.
This particular DCJ study was supported by the Arnold Ventures Philanthropic Trust, a pro bail reform philanthropic group.
That’s why the numbers that DCJ calculated are so interesting. DCJ won’t say it outright, but their numbers show that bail reform has been a failure — as if the rising crime rate after bail reform was not enough proof.
In fact, the DCJ tries to suggest bail reform is a success because, “Across all of New York State, bail reform tended to reduce recidivism for people facing less serious charges and with limited or no recent criminal history.”
But is that really who we should be worried about? Opponents of no-bail are worried about repeat, chronic offenders rather than one-time criminals.
And, in fact, DCJ study found that bail reform “tended to increase recidivism for people facing more serious charges” (violent crimes) “and with recent criminal histories.”
In other words, bad people and repeat offenders committed crimes at a higher rate under bail reform than a similar group who had bail set or were remanded under the old bail law.
A previous DCJ study on NYC also found that the 2020 amendments to the original bail reform law, which slightly toughened the bail laws to allow judges to set bail on certain repeat offenders, actually reduced recidivism.
And yet even these sky-high re-arrest rates actually undercount the damage these released defendants cause, since they only count the number of defendants who get re-arrested, not the number of times they get re-arrested. Nor does every crime result in an arrest.
Arrests outside NYC decreased from 184,000 in 2019 to 154,000 in 2022, even as crimes increased. In fact, while there were 17,000 more crimes in 2022 than in 2019, there were 30,000 fewer arrests.
More people are getting away with crime without being arrested, lowering re-arrest rates..
Recidivism is the problem. Last year the NYPD released a study that showed that just 327 people were responsible for 30% of all shoplifting arrests in NYC in 2022.
They were arrested an average of 20 times each that year.
There is no telling how many times they got away with shoplifting and didn’t get arrested.
But can you imagine the decline in shoplifting that would have occurred had just those 327 individuals been held in jail after say, their FIFTH shoplifting arrest that year?
Allowing judges to consider the defendant’s danger to public safety and risk of recidivism when setting bail (as the overwhelming majority of states and the federal government do) would go a long way to protecting the public.
This is not rocket science. Anyone involved in the criminal justice system could tell you with a pretty high degree of accuracy that people with long criminal records, especially recent criminal records, tend to continue their criminal activity.
- 66% of the people arrested in the first six months of 2023 in New York State for a felony had a prior conviction or a pending case when they were arrested.
- 20% had a pending non-violent felony
- 10% had a pending violent felony.
That is why bail reform was so harmful. In addition to releasing 2,000 career criminals from NYC jails and thousands more from suburban and upstate jails, bail reform prevented judges from setting bail on many of these same individuals when they got arrested and so they were set free to re-offend.
The problem with this study is that the authors are desperately trying to find ways to declare bail reform a success. They claim victory because “overall” recidivism is down from a control group before the law passed.
But that’s a poor comparison, because so many more criminals are being set free that even if the “rate” of recidivism is going up by a small percentage, the overall number of crimes increases by a lot.
And again, comparing the recidivism of people arrested for their first crime misrepresents what the major opposition to no-bail laws are: In short, that judges don’t have the discretion to take criminal history into account.
The study’s authors at one point concede that statistics “indicate that the mandatory release of people with recent justice involvement, even if relatively minor, can be detrimental to recidivism.”
That is the lesson that New York politicians refuse to take to heart.
Jim Quinn was executive district attorney in the Queens DA’s Office, where he served for 42 years.
