By Melanie Skemer, Emily Brennan

The U.S. jail population has tripled over the last 30 years due to surges in the use of pretrial detention and money bail.  On any given day, nearly 450,000 people in the United States are detained while awaiting the resolution of their criminal charges. Many of these individuals, still legally innocent, are in jail because they cannot afford to pay the bail amount set as a condition of their release. Pretrial detention takes a significant toll on the lives of affected individuals, putting them at increased risk of continued involvement with the criminal legal system as well as of losing their jobs, housing, and child custody.

As a result, jurisdictions across the United States are reforming their pretrial systems to reduce the number of people who are held in pretrial detention—that is, who remain in jail while they await the adjudication of their cases. As part of this effort, many jurisdictions are moving away from money bail as a primary means of encouraging people to return for future court dates. Instead, they are increasingly relying on alternatives such as pretrial supervision, which requires released people to meet regularly with supervision staff members while their cases are pending. Pretrial supervision has traditionally required clients to report for in-person meetings, particularly for those assessed as being at relatively high risk of failing to attend a court hearing or of being rearrested. 

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, many pretrial supervision programs shifted in-person meeting requirements to remote check-ins to protect the health of both clients and staff members. For many jurisdictions, this shift highlighted some of the benefits of remote supervision, which include time savings for clients balancing work, school, caregiving, or other responsibilities, and less resource-intensive administration for supervision providers, potentially generating cost savings. At the same time, some members of the pretrial community questioned whether remote supervision was as effective as in-person interaction at meeting clients’ needs and protecting public safety. As the pandemic waned, it remained unclear whether remote supervision was as effective as in-person or hybrid (a mix of in-person and remote) supervision in achieving the main goals of supervision programs: helping clients make their court appearances and avoid new arrests during the pretrial period.

New York: MDRC. 2024, 37pg

By Rafael A. Mangual 

After enacting a sweeping bail reform, New York lawmakers have drawn the ire of constituents who are troubled by the many stories of repeat and serious offenders—some with violent criminal histories—being returned to the street following their arrests. In the state’s biggest city, the public’s growing concerns are buttressed by brow-raising, if preliminary, crime data, amplifying calls for amending or repealing the bail reform. The operative provisions of New York’s bail reform severely limit judicial discretion in pretrial release decisions, increasing the number of pretrial defendants who are being released, often without conditions and without allowing judges to consider the risk that a defendant poses to the public. New York is now the only state that does not allow judges to consider public safety in any pretrial release decisions. This brief begins with an overview of New York’s pre-2020 bail law and the reforms that took effect on January 1. It then highlights the reform’s shortfalls and ends by proposing three changes intended to address the public’s legitimate safety concerns while preserving the spirit of the reform effort and addressing some of the inequities and inefficiencies inherent in a system that is heavily reliant on the use of monetary pretrial release conditions. The proposed changes include: • Empowering judges to assess the public safety risk posed by pretrial defendants, and setting out a process that allows them to detain dangerous or chronic offenders; • Allowing judges to revoke or amend release decisions in response to a pretrial defendant’s rearrest; and • In the intermediate term, setting aside additional funds or diverting existing funds to reduce the time a defendant stands to spend in jail if remanded to pretrial detention.  

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2020. 14p.