Topic: Featured Jurisdictions

New academic analysis shows Chicago area bail reform efforts since 2017 have had no impact on new criminal activity or new violent criminal activity of those defendants released pretrial.

Overall crimes rates in Chicago, including violent crime rates, were not any higher than expected after the implementation of the effort. The analysis echoes that performed in other areas where similar bail reform efforts have been undertaken such as New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia.

You can read the full report here. 

Everyone wants safe communities. But our research suggests that releasing people on their own recognizance does not make communities less safe. And taking money away from people to secure their release does not make communities safer. Monetary bail, however, does impose a burden on those individuals and their families who are least able to afford it.

Like bail reform efforts in other cities, Chicago’s initiative demonstrates that it is possible to decrease the use of monetary bail and decrease pretrial detention – and lessen the financial, physical, and psychological harms that come with pretrial detention – without affecting criminal activity or crime rates.

In Chicago, the effort began on September 17, 2017, when the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County issued General Order 18.8A (GO18.8A) to reform felony bail practices in Cook County.

GO18.8A established a decision-making process for felony bond court judges. Under the order, bond court judges were to first determine whether a defendant should be released pretrial and, if not, hold the defendant in jail. If the defendant could be released, GO18.8A created a presumption of release without monetary bail; however, if monetary bail was necessary, the order stated that bail should be set at an amount affordable for the defendant. In the end, GO18.8A established a presumption of release without monetary bail for the large majority of felony defendants in Cook County and encouraged the use of lower bail amounts for those required to post monetary bail.

After GO18.8A, there was a significant increase in the use of I-Bonds, or individual recognizance bonds for which defendants are released without having to post monetary bail.

The impact of this shift was dramatic: 3,559 additional people received an I-Bond in the six months after bail reform began. The real impact of this change was that none of these defendants had to post monetary bail to be released pretrial, saving these defendants and their families $13.6 million in avoided bond costs.

D-Bond amounts, where a defendant pays 10% of the bail amount to secure release from jail­–were also lower after bail reform. Before the effort began, the average was $9,316 to secure release, compared to $3,824 afterwards.

Combined with increased I-Bond usage, our analysis showed that Chicago saved defendants and their families more than $31.4 million in the six months after the initiative was introduced. That means bail reform in Chicago allowed defendants and their families to have $31.4 million available to be used for rent, food, and medical care while their cases were being resolved.

Likewise, the initiative did this without affecting new criminal activity of those released or increasing crime.

Bail reform efforts across the United States have accelerated in recent years, driven by concerns about the overuse of monetary bail, the potentially disparate impact of pretrial detention on poor and minority defendants, and the effects of bail decisions on local jail populations.

Proponents of bail reform advocate for reducing or eliminating the use of monetary bail, arguing that many defendants are held in jail pretrial solely because they cannot afford to post bail. Opponents counter that reducing the use of monetary bail or increasing the number of people released pretrial could result in more defendants failing to appear for court.

A debate has also played out in the media regarding the link between GO18.8A and possible diminished safety, but until our analysis, a rigorous, objective, external assessment has been lacking.

Ultimately, we found that money should not be the mechanism by which the court determines which people to hold and which people to release. Opponents of bail reform may continue to argue that reducing the use of monetary bail and increasing the number of people released pretrial will result in more defendants committing more crimes while on pretrial release. But that is not what happened following bail reform in Cook County, consistent with experiences following bail reform in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia.

 —Dr. Don Stemen is an Associate Professor and Chairperson in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology.

—Professor David Olson is a Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Loyola University Chicago and is also the Co-Director (with Diane Geraghty, Loyola School of Law) of Loyola’s interdisciplinary Center for Criminal Justice Research, Policy, and Practice.

Prompted by recent cries for police reform across the U.S., many jurisdictions have made or promised significant changes to law enforcement funding, frequently allocating additional funding to behavioral health and community services. Many sites are exploring or expanding community-based emergency first response as an alternative to police response to individuals experiencing crisis and those with mental health needs.

As technical assistance providers to the Safety and Justice Challenge, Policy Research, Inc. (PRI) has compiled an ongoing list of examples of this shift across the country, to serve as a resource to other communities who may be considering their own reform.

Here are some examples of changes in SJC sites:

• Baltimore, Maryland: In June, the City Council approved a $22.4 million (less than 5%) cut to the Police Department’s $550 million 2021 budget, including nearly $7 million from overtime spending.
• Portland, Oregon: In late 2019, the city announced a similar program to CAHOOTS, Portland Street Response (PSR), which takes police off of low-priority 9-1-1 calls and instead sends a new branch of first responders, trained in behavioral health, to address issues related to people experiencing homelessness or mental health crises. In June, the Portland City Council approved $4.8 million funding for PSR, along with a 3% reduction (about $15 million) to the Portland Police Bureau budget.
• Los Angeles, California: In June, the Los Angeles City Council voted to cut $150 million (of an $1.8 billion total budget) from the city’s police department budget, halting a planned increase in funding. The $150 million will be redirected toward community-building projects and health and education initiatives in minority communities. ­In July, the city council announced plans to expand a pilot program to create a new police bureau focused on community policing, relying on guidance from community leaders, representatives from city hall, and others.
• New York City, New York: In July, the New York City Council approved shifting roughly $1 billion away from the $6 billion annual Police Department budget. The budget also shifts school safety and homeless outreach away from police. New York City’s Crisis Management System (CMS) program deploys teams of credible messengers who mediate conflicts on the street and connect high-risk individuals to services that can reduce the long-term risk of violence. In the last three years, the Crisis Management System has contributed to a 15% decline in shootings in the 17 highest violence precincts in New York City. In early June, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he plans to increase CMS spending by ten million dollars, hire additional workers, and expand programs to Soundview, Jamaica, Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Canarsie.
• Albuquerque, New Mexico: In June, the Mayor announced the formation of a new department, Albuquerque Community Safety, designed to relieve stress on the city’s police. Instead of the police or fire departments responding to 9-1-1 calls related to homelessness, addiction, and mental health, the new division will deploy unarmed personnel made up of social workers, housing and homelessness specialists, and violence prevention coordinators. Mayor Keller stated that the department’s creation will start with a focus on “restructuring and reallocating resources” that the city is already investing in different areas, saying he anticipated “tens of millions of dollars that will move” with the department’s creation.
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: In June, the City Council approved a 2021 fiscal year budget that reduced police department funding by $33 million and allocated $45 million into affordable housing, arts funding, and social services addressing poverty.
• San Francisco, California: In July, the Mayor announced a $120 million cut from the city police and sheriff’s departments over the next two years, redirecting funding toward addressing disparities in the Black community including in housing, mental health and wellness, workforce development, economic justice, education, advocacy, and accountability.
• Durham, North Carolina: In June 2019, the city council voted against hiring 18 new patrol officers after a public campaign led by Durham Beyond Policing. The city is now exploring a new “community safety and wellness task force” instead. While the city’s 2021 budget did include an increase of $1.2 million for the police department, $1 million was also added for a Community Health and Safety Task Force to “potentially take on some of the responsibilities of policing the city over time.”

Many jurisdictions around the country are also taking a hard look at the wisdom of continuing to place police in schools. Several SJC sites that have pledged to remove or removed police from schools include:

• Portland, Oregon: In June, the Portland Public Schools superintendent announced that it will discontinue the regular presence of SROs. New investments in counselors, social workers, and culturally specific partners were proposed.
• Milwaukee, Wisconsin: The Board of School Directors voted unanimously in June to terminate its contract with the Milwaukee Police Department in its public schools.
• Madison, Wisconsin: The school board voted unanimously in June to end its contract with the Madison Police Department for SROs.
• Portland, Maine: The school board voted in July to remove SROs from Deering and Portland High School. Money previously allocated for SROs will be diverted toward programs like “supporting security at large events and de-escalation training for staff.”

COVID-19 and the nationwide racial equity and justice protests over the past few months have shifted the ground beneath much of the advocacy and work that we do. We are faced with an opportunity and responsibility to not only respond to the changing landscape of criminal justice and behavioral health fields, but to advance reform.

—Ashley Krider is a Senior Project Associate at Policy Research, Inc.

As New Orleans’ criminal legal system has risen to the challenge of the Coronavirus, we’ve brought resilience lessons we learned during Hurricane Katrina to bear:

Knowing Where People Are

After the storm, thousands of people went without legal representation for months because we simply couldn’t track people. There were two tourists from Ohio, for example, who had been arrested on public order offenses and spent more than a month in jail.

This time around, we have a case management system, and our office is funded, albeit still so poorly that we are being forced to furlough some attorneys. But we have been able to immediately track people and start litigating to help the most vulnerable. It’s a huge difference from the ad-hoc tracking system we were using in 2005.

Seizing the Moment To Reduce Our Jail Population

Our pre-Covid jail population was 1,052, and we’ve since reduced it to 799—a level not seen in New Orleans since the 1970s, although if we were incarcerating people at the international rate, we’d have just 137 people in our jail, so there is still a long way to go for our criminal legal system reform efforts.

Thanks to our tracking system we’ve been able to prioritize getting the most vulnerable people out of jail. Initially, we tried using immediate release orders, which we had developed after Katrina and which were common practice whenever a storm was coming. Since we weren’t facing a hurricane, we had to show why this crisis warranted emergency releases. But we could litigate straight away.

Building Coalitions and Constituency For Reform

When you have audacious goals for criminal legal system reform, three things get in your way: resources, processes, and values. Values are the most difficult to change.

New Orleans has been the recipient of more than $3.5 million in funding from the Safety and Justice Challenge since 2015, with the goal of reducing the city’s jail population, and we were already making good incremental progress.

There’s no doubt that the COVID-19 crisis has spurred that huge further reduction in our jail population, but it’s the coalitions and relationships we’ve been building for some time that were instrumental in helping us spring into action, this time around.

A big lesson we learned after Katrina was that if you look alone, then folks with the power to do something will readily ignore you, whereas if you have constituency, then your chances for success go up exponentially.

Some of the criminal reforms that came out of Katrina had been thought of as too ambitious before. And I’d encourage reformers to view bold future reforms in a similar light, now, in the era of Coronavirus, including bond reform and bail reform. Our user-pay justice system is folding in this crisis, and it’s time to make changes.

“It’ll never last.”

I have a vivid memory of a judge taking me aside after Katrina and telling me the reforms we’d made would never last. That judge is gone, now, and we’re still here, along with many of our reforms. The point is that the changes we are making to the justice system today have the potential to become permanent.

Before Katrina, for example, our office wasn’t even publicly funded. Meanwhile, we’ve learned how to tackle both the short-term emergencies while strategizing and working together to aim for the longer-term reforms we want to see.

It’s important to be clear about what we want to see happen, and also to be clear that there are some things, in an emergency, that we’ll tolerate. But we’re also being very clear that once we get past it, things need to change.

Drawing The Line

After Katrina, it was very important for the defense bar to draw a line and assert our independence. There was one example where a defense attorney upset a judge and was hauled out of a courtroom in handcuffs. It sparked controversy, but a line was drawn, and we’ve held that ground since then.

We hold on to these reforms by proving that the reforms work and create value for our community and system. It’s also important to engage with media and others to tell the story of success.

I also remind people that whatever the reform, the empire always strikes back. There’s this reflexive systemic desire to reclaim what is lost. We’ve got to remain vigilant and be ready to defend the positive changes we’re able to make as a result of addressing this crisis.

—Derwyn Bunton is the Chief District Defender for Orleans Parish, in New Orleans, where he leads the Orleans Public Defenders Office. You can watch Mr. Bunton’s appearance as part of an April 10 webinar hosted by the American Bar Association, about lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina, by clicking here.

The Coronavirus pulled back the curtain on racial disparities in Buncombe County’s jails.

We have been meeting, countywide, and working intentionally on these issues since November 2018.

Likewise, if America has learned anything from the death of George Floyd, it’s that systemic racism exists. If people are willing to address the question of how they contribute to it, then we’ll be able to meaningfully make progress all over the country.

I chair the 26-person-strong Buncombe County Criminal Justice Equity Workgroup in North Carolina. It has diverse membership from our pretrial, court, and government systems, as well as from the local community.

Our goals are to normalize and prioritize racial equity, giving a shared analysis and definitions; to operationalize those efforts by providing tools and data to develop strategies and drive results; and to organize internal infrastructure and partnerships to make it happen.

The data show a baseline disproportionality in racial representations within our jails: Black people represent 6.3% of Buncombe County’s population but make up approximately 25% of our pretrial jail population. During Coronavirus, owing to COVID-prompted reduction in the jail population, the pre-trial population that is Black has been hovering between 29%-31%.

Even as we have reduced our jail population more broadly as part of our prolonged work with the Safety and Justice Challenge, we have struggled to make progress on the racial disparities in our jail population. The Racial Equity Workgroup was founded to work specifically on reducing those racial disparities and determine methods and policy changes that can achieve that goal.

Workgroup members view the group as a place where they can deal with uncomfortable issues and speak without judgment. By showing up in the first place, there’s a commitment to racial equity. We start from there. Broad representation from around the community means we’re able to take a community-wide approach.

As we work on the justice system, we have to look more deeply into our society as a whole while keeping the big picture in mind.

Our Community Engagement Workgroup, for example, surveyed residents of public housing as part of its community outreach, and found that their priority concerns were: systemic poverty, a lack of jobs and resources, outsiders bringing in and using drugs, peer pressure, a lack of understanding of the justice system, the school to prison pipeline, as well as police attitudes towards their community.

Data also helps us to get beyond surface level conversations and has built momentum in our jurisdiction to achieve our goals. Having the data available without pointing to a specific person who’s responsible has helped us to delve into some tough but necessary conversations.

Luckily, our group has met for long enough now that we can have conversations respectfully on these issues and bring the conversation back to the data each time.

Right now, one of the things that we’re looking into is the disparity in the length of stay for violent crimes. We are trying to understand when we compare Black people and white people with similar charges and backgrounds, why is the length of stay longer for Black people? We raise the question: if people of color are often charged earlier in life and more aggressively, is that leading to longer sentences or longer periods in custody because they may have a longer record? Conducting case reviews, this has not always been the case. So we ask ourselves, why? We are trying to find the root causes so that we can ultimately tell our court system and local law enforcement agencies: “This is the policy change we need to make for racial equity in our community.”

We’re looking at the court system as whole, asking things like are we having bond hearings as frequently for Black clients as we are for white clients. As a public defender, I’m asking myself “Am I negotiating as hard as I would for my Black client as I would for my white client? Am I raising these issues in my discussion with court actors?”

We’re all doing that work. It can be mentally exhausting for people of color to lead, particularly on top of our full-time jobs. But the working group all show up with an incentive to change things. And we know we have the power to strengthen our community.

—Yolanda Fair is a public defender and chair of the Buncombe County Criminal Justice Equity Workgroup.

It’s time for criminal justice professionals to reconsider whether and to what extent leveraging a jail or prison sentence is necessary to effectively engage people in behavioral health treatment – or, for that matter, in pretrial services, or parole and probation supervision.

Indeed, the cudgel of incarceration or reincarceration for non-compliance has long been seen as a staple of court-based treatment. But what if that assumption – or at least the field’s overreliance on it – is wrong? Not just from a values perspective, but empirically?

In the spirit of the Safety and Justice Challenge, which is seeking to reduce the use of jail across America, my colleagues and I recently published a brief called “The Myth Of Legal Leverage?”, which explores this question further. Drawing on various bodies of empirical research, the paper posits that relational factors are likely the best and most salient predictors of good outcomes – from recidivism reduction to sustainable recovery.

Strikingly, this argument resonates more broadly across the sciences (e.g., epigenetics, interpersonal neurobiology, attachment, post-traumatic growth, etc.), where there has emerged an elegant consensus about how people change. From our earliest moments as infants and throughout the course of our lives, our capacity for change turns on our access to good, supportive relationships.

Consider the oft-cited “still-face experiment”, where a mother plays with her baby, and then unexpectedly stops responding to the baby with a still face. You can watch it being conducted by Harvard researchers here. The baby very quickly picks up on the mother’s non-engagement, and uses all her abilities to try get the mother back. She smiles, she points, she cries, seeking to get her mother to respond. In just two minutes, when babies don’t get a normal reaction, they feel the stress of the experience, and lose control of their bodies due to the overwhelming and destabilizing anxiety.

It turns out that people retain this sensitivity to—and constitutional need for—intersubjective connection their entire lives. Even the brain of a person who has experienced severe abuse and neglect can still “rewire” in a positive and healthy way once it finds a secure, healing relationship. All of these developments point to the fact that we’re relational beings, and that relationship is a space where we can overcome obstacles in our past and enable us to heal and thrive in the future.

Admittedly, centering relationship marks a challenge to the whole criminal justice field, to shift from a model that pathologizes people, and seeks to control them, to one that values them as human beings that need help and support. Among other things, we will need a seismic culture change to make it happen.

But if we listen to people with lived experience with the criminal justice system, we repeatedly hear that being treated on a human level, in a collaborative and empathic way, and in a way that affirms their ability to overcome challenging life circumstances, is absolutely key to their success.

Since the completion of “The Myth Of Legal Leverage?”, we have witnessed significant reductions in the use of jail due to COVID-19. As we gaze ahead to a post-COVID-19 justice landscape, many of us are wondering whether and how we might sustain—or even accelerate—these reductions. Is this moment a proof of concept for a country that can safely thrive with far less incarceration? Will we make the necessary investments in community-based and-led preventative programs to keep people out of the justice system in the first instance? Will we take an unflinching and intersectional look at how system actors exercise their discretion to incarcerate? For folks with more acute behavioral health needs, can we effectively prevent a “third wave” of institutionalization by finally creating a comprehensive and equitable continuum of outpatient services (in lieu of psychiatric and correctional institutions)?

While there are rarely easy answers, there is little doubt that a finer realization of justice in America will demand a deeper appreciation of relationship and our shared humanness.