How bail, jails & more fit together
New York’s do-gooders have been on a tear this year, winning new laws, regulations and zoning fights that promise a brighter future for the state — everything from bail reform to City Council votes that have initiated the closing of Rikers Island.
Now comes the hard part: turning big promises into reality. This will require the decidedly unsexy work of painstakingly coordinating ideas that individually sound wonderful, but can easily clash and cancel each other without careful planning.
It happens all the time in government. In an effort to encourage recycling, we have a bottle law that provides a 5-cent deposit refund on most disposable bottles and cans — but we also require homeowners to separate out containers and place them on the sidewalk recycling, or face a fine.
If one incentive to recycle is good, two must be better, right? Not necessarily.
The Sanitation Department has complained for years about the armies of “canners,” who travel the streets snatching up cans, bottles and other recyclables. That makes it impossible for the city to measure its own recycling efforts, and hampers the ability to create a sustainable market for recycled goods.
New York’s two conflicting reforms are a big part of why the city’s anemic recycling rate of 16% is less than half the national rate.
We saw another clash of good intentions in Albany earlier this year, when state lawmakers approved a bill enabling non-citizens to get driver’s licenses. Great idea — but not compatible with another good-government reform that would automatically register drivers to vote by conveying DMV data to local boards of election.
Lawmakers had to yank legislation from the floor at the last minute to prevent a nightmare scenario of non-citizens illegally being registered to vote.
New Yorkers of a certain age saw a conflicting-policy failure on an epic scale when a series of media investigations in the 1960s and 70s revealed widespread abuse and neglect going on in the state’s mental hospitals. Shocking photos and television footage — by an enterprising young reporter named Geraldo Rivera — came out of the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, which with 6,000 beds was the largest state-run mental health facility in America.
The whole nation, led by New York, charged headlong into deinstitutionalization — close down those giant, uncaring warehouses! — and promised to shift services for the mentally ill to smallerscale, community-based facilities.
But the new network was never properly funded and did not work as advertised; many ill people ended up on the streets, or in homeless shelters or jail.
As a onetime upstate judge, Cheryl Roberts, recently noted in a News op-ed: “mental institutions never really went away, they just morphed into two types: posh mental health facilities costing thousands of dollars a month, or prisons and jails which cost just as much but often deliver poor treatment, if any.”
And we have shamefully underfunded the struggling network of community-based care providers. Roberts notes: “Between 2009 and 2011, states also cumulatively cut more than $1.8 billion from their mental health budgets, with New York State scoring the second-largest cuts in the nation, totaling $132 million.”
All of which brings us to the criminal justice reforms set to take effect in January 2020.
Driven by a desire to end the practice of jailing people for minor offenses merely because they lack bail money, the Legislature has ended the practice of requiring bail for a wide range of crimes. But prosecutors warn that the list of no-bail offenses is too broad.
Ulster County District Attorney Holley Carnright issued a press release reminding New Yorkers that the list now includes “residential burglary, almost all drug sale and possession offenses, some homicides, assaults resulting from drunk driving collisions, many weapons offenses, grand larceny, bribery involving public officials, and many charges involving child pornography.”
Reformers should take the next few months to take a close look at what we’re getting into, and make fixes before the new year.
Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.