Do we protect NYC by jailing New Yorkers?

As election year politics heat up, crime and punishment is becoming an increasingly salient issue. As someone who has worked in criminal justice for four decades, I caution against the facile notion that more punishment — particularly locking more people up pretrial — equals less crime.

Last year, Eric Adams defeated more progressive candidates in large part by promising to beat back the increase in shootings and homicides and make the city safer. He has announced an intention to return to some stop-question-frisk policing tactics and bring back punitive segregation, which some people consider solitary confinement, in city jails, and urged rollbacks of the state’s bail reform law.

When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg scaled back prosecution of nonviolent offenses, recognizing that Manhattan accounted for a disproportionate share of the city’s incarcerated population, Adams’ new NYPD commissioner, Keechant Sewell wrote that she was “very concerned” about the reforms’ impact on public safety.

And in November, Republicans won several Long Island races for district attorney and county executive, touting a tough-on-crime message as shootings and homicides spiked during the pandemic. Although such crimes were rising nationally, including in many places that did not enact similar bail reforms, Republican Party Chair Nick Langworthy put the blame squarely on the bail law, saying: “Bail and discovery reform ... has affected every New Yorker and made them less safe.”

These simplistic analyses feel like déjà vu. Throughout the destructive buildup of mass incarceration over the last five decades, crime spikes were routinely blamed on purportedly soft-on-crime policies and turned into electoral advantage, leaving considerable damage in their wake.

But long-term research and experience with crime and incarceration belies such cursory conclusions. Ironically, New York City serves as the nation’s leading example of a jurisdiction that has substantially reduced incarceration over the decades while simultaneously lowering crime. Before we dismantle the state’s bail reforms and start filling up Rikers again, we should learn from that history.

Exhaustive research by the National Academy of Sciences found that the nation’s eight-fold increase in prison populations from 1972 to 2009 had a “highly uncertain” impact on crime but correlated with a “wide range of social costs.” These included “unemployment, poverty, family disruption, poor health and drug addiction” concentrated largely in poor communities of color.

What I witnessed over the past seven months as the city’s correction commissioner was a sea of mostly people of color, incarcerated in violent, squalid conditions that one state legislator rightly called a “human rights atrocity.” In 2021, Black and Latino people were incarcerated in city jails at an appalling 25 and 10 times the rate of white people, respectively.

The good news is that there are a lot fewer people in the city’s jails than there used to be. Over the past three decades, Adams’ four predecessors — Mayors Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg, and de Blasio — quietly but successfully reduced both crime and incarceration, yielding much more information about how to achieve safety and decency than 18 months of crime data during an unprecedented pandemic.

From 1991 to 2020, the average number of people in New York City’s jails declined by 79%, from 21,764 to 4,541. This happened without jeopardizing public safety; from 1993 to 2020, homicides and violent crime declined by 76% and 77%, respectively.

There’s plenty of evidence that reducing incarceration is beneficial on the micro as well as macro level. For example, research has shown that, holding other relevant factors equal, being sentenced to city jails increases a person’s recidivism rate by 7%.

There is no world in which we can guarantee that nobody kept out of jail pretrial will reoffend. Some percentage of those who make bail, those who are released of their own recognizance and the higher-risk population that’s released under supervised release will go on to commit misdemeanors and, more rarely, felonies. But a minority who reoffends can’t become an excuse to willy-nilly lock up thousands upon thousands of innocent-until-proven guilty people.

In 1993, then-Attorney General Bill Barr wrote “The Case for More Incarceration,” in which he claimed “we are incarcerating too few criminals, and the public is suffering as a result.” That has proven to be a glib conclusion that stoked a racist and destructive rise in prison populations. Fortunately, at the same time and under Republican and Democratic mayors, New York City dramatically reduced crime and incarceration more than any other large city in the country. The recent, pandemic-driven increases in crime should not prompt us to discard decades of bipartisan success in favor of bromides unlikely to improve safety.