The bail data debate
New numbers from the state courts show that 23% of the approximately 14,000 New Yorkers in the five boroughs who, from January 2020 to June 2021, were placed on pretrial “supervised release” — meaning, allowed to live freely in the community, with social supports — were rearrested for felonies, and another 18% were rearrested for misdemeanors. They also show significantly lower reoffense rates for individuals released on their own recognizance, and for whom bail was set.
There are lessons here. They’ve not simplistic ones. New Yorkers on supervised release are accused of far more serious crimes than those released on their own recognizance, so those populations can’t be credibly compared. As for those let out on bail, they had much less time in the community on average than those in supervised release — again thwarting meaningful apples-to-apples analysis. Nor is it the case that felonies committed by this small population are noticeably driving up overall crime rates.
That said, a 23% felony rearrest rate (and 6% violent felony rearrest rate) for those provided social supports is undoubtedly higher than city officials led New Yorkers to believe was likely to be the case. A November 2019 Bill de Blasio press release touting expansion of the city’s supervised release program boasts that “92% of clients” who had been enrolled had no felony arrests, with the then-mayor boasting of the program’s ability to “ensure that people who can be safely supervised in the community are able to stay there.”
What went wrong? COVID’s effects cannot be minimized: The dislocating pandemic disrupted people’s connections to the very services that were supposed to help keep them on the straight and narrow.
But was that all? The numbers may well validate a common complaint made by district attorneys before bail reforms were passed in 2019: that the overhaul was being done on the cheap. As then-Manhattan DA Cy Vance put it, “Without funding supervised release...I think we are not being serious, because supervised release is very expensive.”
Nor can we rule out the possibility that in some cases, some of the wrong people are being placed in supervised release rather than being remanded to jail, which may support the argument that rather than basing decisions about release on rigid lists of crimes, judges should have more freedom to make judgments that factor in the risk an individual might present to the community.
There’s an old joke: An economist asks a colleague how his wife is doing. He answers, “Compared to what?” Comparisons in economics and criminology are devilishly difficult, and it is wholly unreasonable to expect a 0% recidivism rate among people accused of serious crimes. But nearly one in four closely supervised defendants committing felonies? That’s too high.