Less-crowded jails, fewer arrests and time for long-needed fixes
Pandemic has been positive in some areas of criminal justice, leaders say
release.
“We did not object to 75 [of them] being released,” Shellenberger said.
Baltimore County created a Saturday court docket to handle pleas and bail reviews “to speed up the process of getting people bail reviews and out of jail,” Shellenberger said.
With more people being released instead of detained after arrest, more people are going onto home monitoring, said Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy.
“Perhaps we need to start talking about maybe having a statewide system for pretrial to help those counties that don’t have that kind of system and don’t have options for letting people out,” Shellenberger said.
The Baltimore pretrial supervision program is run by the state. Robert L. Green, secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said diversion to the city’s pretrial supervision program has increased 40% over the past two months.
Green said there have been 3,399 releases from the prison system from March 1 to May 1, about 1,025 of which were “post-conviction” releases. The rest dealt largely with pretrial releases, according to data shared by Green.
“This reduction is the result of deflection and shedding opportunities through mechanisms available to the department,” Green told legislators.
Paul B. DeWolfe, the state’s top public defender, said the pretrial jail population statewide is down 20% compared to this time last year. As defense attorneys often advocate that a client be released, DeWolfe said the change has been due largely to prosecutors now agreeing.
DeWolfe said his staff remain concerned about conditions for those being held, and about accommodations to allow attorneys to confer with their clients.
“We are quite frankly having difficulty accessing our clients at all in some jurisdictions,” he said, calling for an expansion of video conferencing.