Bail Reform Has Made NYC Safer, Yet Another Study Confirms

In 2019, the New York legislature passed changes to the state's bail laws that eliminated cash bail for misdemeanors and most nonviolent felonies. These reforms were intended to rectify a longstanding injustice in our criminal legal system, wherein a rich person charged with a crime may go free pending their trial while a poor person charged with the same crime is sent to jail. 

The backlash to this reform from those who preferred to maintain the previous status quo, one in which judges had the unfettered ability to jail legally innocent people based on how much money they had at their disposal, was immediate and noisy. Prosecutors, cops, Republican politicians, publications owned by Rupert Murdoch, and the entire crime-panic industrial complex all immediately declared that bail reform would drive a recidivist crime wave, and that New York's gutters would be running with blood as a result.