While efforts to reduce or eliminate money bail has been a hot-button issue in recent years, with some attributing rises in violent crime to such reforms, analysts looked at 33 U.S. cities, 22 of which have implemented bail reform — like Atlanta and Dallas — and 11 which have not. They found there was no statistically significant difference between the crime rates in either category.
"In other words, there is no reason to believe that bail reform has led to increased crime," the Brennan Center said in the August 15 report.
According to the Brennan Center, this is the first-ever national study on the impact of bail reform on crime rates. Written by Brennan Center economics fellow Terry-Ann Craigie and senior counsel Ames Grawert, the study looked at crime data on major offenses such as murder, robbery, assault and grand larceny, from 2015 through 2021, in cities including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco.
They analyzed the data by looking at the crime rates from six months before reforms had been implemented in certain cities and comparing those with crime rates 12 months after reform implementation. They also compared the six-year trajectory of crime rates in cities with bail reform and without it.
According to the report, the data showed that overall, rates of major crime offenses remained largely stable in cities after they implemented bail reform. It also showed that major offense crime rates were slightly higher overall in cities that had not implemented bail reform, and violent crime was essentially the same in cities that had bail reform and those that did not.
The study factored for several different variables, Grawert and Craigie said in a live online discussion on Thursday. It looked specifically at different types of bail reform — whether it was enacted legislatively, which the study said tends to be more sweeping, versus through a prosecutor or the court.
They also identified the cities that have had particularly contentious political fights over bail reform, including Buffalo, New York; Chicago; Houston; and Newark, New Jersey, to see if the correlation between crime rates and bail reform was stronger in those locations, Craigie said.
She said they used advanced statistical models economists usually used to analyze economic phenomena and forecast trends.
"There are so many factors, so many policies, that are working concurrently with bail reform that could muddy or conflate our results," Craigie said. "So by using these sophisticated econometric methods, we were able to identify the impact of bail reform specifically and how that changed the different crime outcomes."
Crime rates did go up after the pandemic began, Grawert noted, but they have been going back down. However, even while crime rates were spiking, the analysts found no evidence bail reform had influenced the uptick, as similar trends were happening in cities across the country that had not eliminated or reduced money bail.
"There's never any single factor for why crime rates rise or fall so dramatically, especially like they did in 2020, so I think the need to look for that simple solution was one of the reasons that bail reform became a scapegoat instead of having more serious conversations about what we can do to build safer communities," Grawert said. Some states and jurisdictions even rolled back some of their reforms under the pressure.
"And the pressure was such that some states and jurisdictions even rolled back some of their reforms."
One unintended consequence that Grawert and Craigie said they were surprised to see in the data was that some judges in jurisdictions where money bail had been eliminated were more likely to simply keep offenders in jail.
"I think the expectation is that when money bail is no longer an option, judges will go from setting bail to releasing more people under their own recognizance," Grawert said. "That is broadly true. That is what happens in many jurisdictions. But you can also see an uptick in the number of cases where judges skip right over bail and order someone sent to jail. This is an unfortunate outcome in some cases, but I think it makes sense, if you consider that some judges might think of bail as a middle ground."
The key to solving this problem, Grawert said, is to invest in pretrial services and programs that can serve as an alternative to incarceration but have no financial element. He even predicts that investment in these kinds of programs could, in the long run, have a positive impact on crime rates.
"I want people to take away that we can have reforms that both enhance safety and justice, and can build a safer country and one that is fairer to everyone, regardless of the money in their bank account, regardless of their access to credit, and, God willing, regardless of color of their skin as well," Grawert said.
--Editing by Lakshna Mehta.
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