Bail reform, like in New York, does not increase crime, Brennan Center reports

Contrary to popular belief, reforms to eliminate, reduce or facilitate bail are not linked to increased crime, according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice.

“This report debunks theories linking bail reform to recent increases in crime,” one report concludes. “We found no evidence to support such a connection, even after evaluating different types of reform in jurisdictions across the country.”

Critics of bail reforms say they have contributed to rising crime in cities, but the report, which analyzed dozens of jurisdictions, including New York and New Jersey, dismissed such claims.

“In fact, in most cases, judges retain broad discretion to prioritize public safety, without the distorting influence of money,” the report states.

Criticism of the reforms intensified following the Covid-19 pandemic, when crime increased, but experts Terry-Ann Craigie and Ames Grawert, authors of the report, put such claims to the test by assessing how crime trends behaved.

“To date, researchers have largely evaluated bail reform in individual cities or states, finding little to no evidence that these policies increased crime,” the report says. “This study is the first to use data from dozens of jurisdictions across the country to demonstrate the causal impact of bail reform on crime trends.”

The Brennan Center for Justice analysis compares felony crime rates from 2015 to 2021 in 22 cities that had some form of bail reform in place with 11 others that had no such plan.

“The analysis focuses first on all serious crimes in all jurisdictions and then on specific types of crimes,” it said.

New York implemented a reform in 2020 that eliminated monetary bail and required bail for non-violent crimes.

“In other cases, judges must set the least restrictive conditions that will ‘reasonably ensure’ a return to court,” the report says.

Various crimes are analyzed, such as those against property, violent crimes and theft.

“We looked at the cities (Buffalo, Chicago, Houston, Newark and New York City) where reforms had the greatest impact on how and when bail was set,” it says. “We compared crime trends in these five cities to those in cities that had not enacted bail reform and removed from the sample the other cities that had implemented reforms. Again, no statistically significant effects emerged.”