Kathy Willens/AP Photo
A sign advertising a bail bonds business is displayed near Brooklyn’s jail and courthouse complex in New York, July 7, 2015.
The first nationwide study of the causal effects of bail reform on crime trends definitively discredits the narrative that limiting cash bail leads to spikes in the crime rate.
The study by the Brennan Center for Justice also shows that the significant rise in crime and violent offenses in 2020 was not because of bail reform, and was instead likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting social disruption, including declining mental and community health, local budget cuts, sudden job losses, and fear among the public, which caused many more people to buy and carry guns.
FBI data has shown a historic drop in the rates of violent offenses around the country since last year, although Americans remain quite concerned about crime, as a matter of perception.
Researchers compared major offenses from 2015 through 2021 in 22 cities that implemented some manner of bail reform with 11 other cities that did not. They looked at specific, individual categories of major crime, like murder, assault, and carjacking; they isolated larceny, the only category that can also include misdemeanors, in particular; they isolated specific cities like New York, whose reforms had major and immediate effects on judges’ decisions, and also drew widespread scrutiny; and they analyzed effects based on whether the policies were implemented via legislation, through the court system, or by prosecutors’ offices.
No matter how the data was sliced, the results showed “no statistically significant difference in crime rates between cities that reformed their bail policies and those that did not,” according to the report, which was released today. “In other words, there is no reason to believe that bail reform has led to increased crime,” researchers wrote.
The findings “suggest that policymakers’ recent focus on weakening bail reforms as a response to crime has been misguided—and a distraction from smarter and more promising ways to enhance public safety,” researchers said.
BAIL REFORM SEEKS TO KEEP PEOPLE who haven’t yet been convicted from being jailed simply because they cannot afford a fine, which remains a ubiquitous practice in the U.S. despite a broad consensus that its use often violates the Constitution, to say nothing of fundamental notions of fairness and justice. Many cash bail systems in the U.S. are also likely in violation of international law.
Yet there are many more people incarcerated in local jails pretrial, and presumed innocent, than in the federal prison system. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, roughly 70 percent of all people in jails have not been convicted.
Terry-Ann Craigie, an economist with the Brennan Center and co-author of the new report, told me that previous studies looking for a causal relationship between bail and crime rates were mostly focused on a particular jurisdiction, or a handful of cities.
“Our study tends to be a bit more comprehensive, looking at 33 cities in all regions of the U.S., and at the period between 2015 and 2021, including the pandemic,” Craigie said.
The new findings add to a growing body of empirical work that has found no evidence at all to support claims by conservatives and moderates that criminal justice reform, particularly bail reform, causes crime waves. Studies by academic researchers, advocates, and even some court systems themselves show the same results.
There are many more people incarcerated in local jails pretrial, and presumed innocent, than in the federal prison system.
Still, the current Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, regularly repeats the falsehood that people arrested around the country are routinely released before trial, without being subject to bail requirements, and that he was singled out in the criminal and civil proceedings against him, for example.
Although it’s flown under the radar, Trump’s current criminal justice platform calls liberal prosecutors and cities that have reformed cash bail practices “radical Marxist[s],” and includes promises to open federal investigations of their departments, as well as creating a related right to sue for citizens. “If your small business is pillaged because shoplifting goes unpunished, if you’re brutally attacked by a violent felon released without bail or bond, then you will be entitled to massive damages,” according to the Trump campaign.
And in April, the Democratic governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, expressed her openness yet again to rolling back 2019 reforms that limited the use of cash bail.
America is one of just two countries on Earth with a for-profit cash bail system and famously the world’s most prolific jailer. The notion that, in this most punitive democracy in the world, U.S. prosecutors and judges are letting provably dangerous criminals back on the streets was always dubious, at best. Indeed, the argument rests wholly on the false assumption that reform requires judges to let dangerous people out of jail, when all bail reform measures in fact maintain judges’ broad discretion to prioritize public safety, and focus instead on reducing the corrupting influence that money can have under our prevailing bail system. At worst, it’s a ploy based on Americans’ racialized fears about violent crime, harking back to the infamous, racist Willie Horton campaign ad. The Trump campaign has in fact vowed to replicate that race-baiting tactic while running against Vice President Kamala Harris, a former local prosecutor, this campaign season.
Before the Brennan Center’s nationwide study, researchers at Loyola University Chicago found that a 2017 bail reform order issued by Cook County’s chief judge saved residents more than $31 million in bail payments, kept hundreds out of jail, and had no effect on crime.
Since 2019, data from the New York City Criminal Justice Agency, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, and from the city comptroller “show that the share of released people awaiting trial who are rearrested remained roughly the same before and after implementation of bail reforms.”
A 2020 study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia School of Law showed that Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s 2018 cash bail reforms had little effect on recidivism.
A 2022 study by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that focused on murder rates found that localities that enacted bail reform between 2015 and 2021 actually experienced a smaller post-pandemic uptick in homicide compared with cities with traditional “tough on crime” policies (47 percent compared with 51 percent).
A January 2023 paper authored by criminologists at Loyola Chicago and released by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation found that “neither violent nor nonviolent crimes or charges increased markedly immediately after jurisdictions implemented bail reform.”
And a 2024 paper by researchers with the City University of New York’s Institute for State & Local Governance showed no apparent relationship between crime and lower pretrial incarceration rates. It also showed that people released pretrial as part of jail population reduction reforms that were spurred by the pandemic were not driving changes in crime rates.
“Most individuals released from jail on pretrial status did not return to jail custody, and local violent crime rates varied regardless of changes to the jail population—suggesting that jail reduction reforms can be implemented safely,” the CUNY researchers wrote.
The preponderance of the data shows that conservatives and moderate Democrats who blame bail reform for crime waves are either plain wrong, looking for an easy way to demonstrate their toughness on crime, or simply fearmongering. And it also offers liberals and progressives hard evidence to support continued calls for criminal justice and bail reform.
