The state’s radical 2019 law has led to the release of large numbers of criminals from jail and to a drastic increase in crime.
The state’s radical 2019 law has led to the release of large numbers of criminals from jail and to a drastic increase in crime.
A new report from the Manhattan Institute shows how the bail-reform law of 2019 and other progressive crime policies have wreaked havoc on the Big Apple. The report, authored by Jim Quinn, the former executive assistant district attorney in Queens County, sums up the impact in its title, “More Criminals, More Crime.”
New York State’s 2019 law, as the report explains, established a certain set of criminal charges, known as “qualifying offenses,” for which judges could set bail and hold a defendant in jail. Many crimes were excluded, among them residential burglaries, nearly all felony drug cases, and cases in which the defendant was charged with unarmed robbery while committing the crime with the help of another person. According to the 2019 law, judges could not hold defendants pending bail on almost all nonviolent felony offenses regardless of prior criminal record. Judges could not set bail on more than 350 crimes. Neither under the 2019 law nor with later amendments could the judge take into account the defendant’s likelihood of re-offending or the risk to public safety when determining release conditions.
The report explains how these measures contributed to crime and re-offending rates in New York City, covering the 2019 bail reform and 2020 and 2022 amendments. Simply put, the 2019 law put more criminal defendants awaiting trial back on the streets, where many broke more laws. By March 15, 2020, just two and a half months after the law went into effect and before Covid was a factor, crime rose 20.05 percent in New York City compared with the same period year-to-date in 2019, before the bail-reform law went into effect. Burglary rose 26.5 percent, robbery 33.9 percent, shooting incidents 22.9 percent, and car theft 68 percent. The only crimes to show decreases were murder and rape, for which judges could still set bail.
By the beginning of 2020, the bail-reform law led to pretrial release of more than 2,000 inmates who had been charged with nonviolent felonies and misdemeanors. Speaking with National Review, Quinn questioned why officials sought to dismantle a system that had been working: “The criminal-justice system had brought crime down from 1993 by about 76 percent up until 2019. Every single year since 1993, crime had gone down in New York City. The population in city jails has gone down consistently since 1993. What is the evidence that the system is broken?” He accused the Left of operating on a “myth” about the system, that it was “corrupt and racist and crooked.” From there, progressive activists used bail reform to fight what they considered “mass incarceration.”
“There’s stuff about over-policing and targeting minority communities. That’s all BS, and it’s said by people who really don’t understand policing, or they’re not willing to think about it clearly,” Quinn said.
Various amendments were added to the bail-reform law, including an expansion of the firearms offenses in the list of qualifying offenses. Moreover, there was an addition of factors a judge may take into consideration when deciding whether to set bail. Quinn said these reforms were not particularly effective in tamping down crime: “They helped on the margins. A lot of what they did was just a response to bad public relations. They added a couple of gun charges to make it sound like they were getting tough on gun crime, but the gun charges that they added were minuscule.” While one of the reasons behind bail-reform laws was a concern about mass incarceration, the alternative is to have criminals walking the streets and committing more crimes, Quinn said.
Further, Quinn contends that New York City does not have a mass-incarceration problem. “We’re a city of 8.6 million people. When they started all of this stuff about mass incarceration and bail reform, there were 10,000 people in city jails. You can’t just say something when there is no evidence of it,” he told NR.
“In 2014, NYC’s incarceration rate was 194 per 100,000 people, compared with Los Angeles (263), Chicago (281), Houston (294), Dallas (368), and Philadelphia (810),” he wrote.
As it turns out, bail reform in the name of ending “mass incarceration” has been detrimental to the very group it was intended to help: black Americans. Quinn pointed out in the report that “the proportion of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter victims in NYC who are black increased from 56.6% in 2019 to 65% in 2020 and 67% in 2021.”
In the report, Quinn also highlighted the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, originally formed to determine how to reduce the city’s jail population. In March 2017, the commission recommended decreasing the jail population from almost 10,000 to 5,500 through various policies, including bail reform. Former mayor Bill de Blasio released his plan to cut the jail population to 6,000, close Rikers Island by 2027, and replace it with four new jails with a maximum of 3,300 jail beds — one in each borough except Staten Island.
In response to whether he believes current mayor Eric Adams will close Rikers Island, Quinn said, “I don’t know how they can.” Quinn explained how detrimental closing the jail complex would be: “Crime is going up. The population on Rikers right now is 5,600 to 5,700. . . . Ninety-four percent are there for felonies. It is so irresponsible.” Quinn also said there is no plan to address the inevitable rise in crime that this would create. “You know it’s going to create more havoc on the streets. You know it’s going to increase crime in the city. And you know it’s going to happen in the minority communities and the poorer communities of the city.”
In his report, Quinn made various recommendations to reform current bail laws. He is in favor of the state legislature writing prudent bail-reform legislation that gives judges more flexibility to decide on appropriate pretrial conditions, including bail, because defendants with extensive prior criminal records are potentially dangerous, which the recent bail-reform laws do not address. Moreover, Quinn believes this would allow the judge to make decisions that are best for both the public and the defendant. He also endorses giving judges much more leeway and power to change the conditions of release should a defendant violate the original release conditions or fail to comply with the judge’s order.
“I think people are starting to realize that we made a mistake, and I hope that people in New York sit back and look at this and say, ‘We have to correct this, and we have to get back to some kind of sanity,’” Quinn told NR. “Otherwise, the city is just going to fall apart.”