Key points:
- Yolo County DA Jeff Reisig defends “zero bail” study amid criticism.
- Trump pushes to eliminate cashless bail nationwide, citing Reisig’s study.
- Critics argue Trump’s order prioritizes wealth over public safety concerns.
Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig is once again touting his office’s controversial “zero bail” study, this time as part of President Donald Trump’s push to eliminate cashless bail nationwide. The move has drawn praise from conservative media but sharp criticism from reform advocates who say Reisig is doubling down on faulty data and aligning himself with a broader MAGA crackdown on bail reform.
In an interview with the New York Post, Reisig described his 2023 study as “unequivocal,” claiming it showed that people released on zero bail committed crimes at a rate 169 percent higher than those who posted bail. “The issue is not reasonably debatable,” he told the paper. “The policies create more victims and reward repeat offenders with a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he told the NY Post.
Trump signed an executive order this week threatening to strip federal funding from jurisdictions that do not comply with his cash-bail mandate. Reisig told the Post that Trump was “exactly right to focus on the imminent danger to communities posed by reckless zero-bail policies,” calling them “the most dangerous ‘reform’ policies we’ve experienced in criminal justice.”
The White House, echoing Reisig’s language, said cashless bail “allow[s] dangerous individuals to immediately return to the streets and further endanger law-abiding, hard-working Americans because they know our laws will not be enforced.” Trump’s order directs the attorney general to identify jurisdictions that have substantially eliminated cash bail and to recommend withholding federal funds.
Reisig has made national headlines before with his study, which examined 100 individuals released on zero bail between 2018 and 2019 and compared them with 100 individuals released on traditional bail in prior years. His office claimed that zero-bail releases resulted in reoffending at rates between 77 percent and 136 percent higher, including 103 percent more new felonies and 130 percent more misdemeanors.
But criminal justice researchers and reform groups say Reisig’s study is not only an outlier but deeply flawed. Michael Rempel, executive director of the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College in New York, pointed to studies in New York, New Jersey and Texas that found no evidence linking bail reform to increased crime.
“When you look at well-executed studies in New York, New Jersey and Harris County, Texas — three jurisdictions with significant bail reforms — there’s no evidence of a substantial change in crime or recidivism,” he told the Post. “If anything, some evidence in some of these studies shows that releasing people can avoid the harmful effects of jail.”
The Vera Institute of Justice issued a sharp rebuke of Trump’s order and Reisig’s claims. “Public safety, not wealth, should determine who is released and who remains in jail pending trial,” said Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at Vera, in a statement.
“This decision by the administration is yet another distraction from the very measures Trump has taken that jeopardize the safety of our communities. Cash bail privileges the wealthy and penalizes those who cannot pay the price of their freedom. It is a giveaway to the private, for-profit bail bond industry that turns a profit of billions each year.”
Rahman highlighted data from Illinois, which eliminated cash bail statewide in 2023, showing that violent crime decreased and court appearance rates improved. She also pointed to New York, where bail reform reduced the jail population by more than 30 percent, and New Jersey, where crime rates fell following bail reform in 2017. In Washington, D.C., where cash bail has not been used in nearly all cases since 1992, 93 percent of people released pretrial were not rearrested.
“It is clear that cash bail does not make us safe, in fact this reversal will upend incredible progress,” Rahman said.
The Bail Project also condemned Trump’s action.
“If President Trump truly wants to ‘Make America Great Again,’ he should strengthen the values that define our justice system — fairness, equality, and the presumption of innocence,” the group said in its statement.
Reisig’s reliance on his own data has been controversial since the beginning. In 2023, the Vanguard published a detailed critique showing that his analysis omitted key information, used small and possibly biased samples, and failed to provide the raw data necessary to independently verify the findings. “The omission of the raw data or a data appendix makes it impossible to recreate the study,” the Vanguard reported at the time.
The critique noted that the DA’s office compared just 100 zero-bail releases to 100 bail releases, excluding thousands of other cases and leaving out people released on their own recognizance. Crime data from the same period showed that overall arrests and prosecutions in Yolo County were down, raising further doubts about Reisig’s sweeping conclusions.
“The DA should have provided the sample used and used all the available data rather than a select number of releases,” the Vanguard wrote. “Given the DA has always been in opposition to zero bail, bias creeping into the results is a legitimate concern.”
The California Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in In re Humphrey required judges to consider a person’s ability to pay when setting bail, ushering in a new legal framework that made traditional money bail less dominant. Voters rejected Proposition 25 in 2020, which would have replaced money bail with risk assessments, but reform efforts have continued at the local and state levels.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, California implemented emergency zero-bail policies to reduce jail populations, citing public health concerns. Multiple studies conducted during and after that period — including reports from UCLA and UC Berkeley — found no evidence that zero bail drove increases in crime.
At the same time, other jurisdictions across the country have advanced bail reform. Illinois became the first state to eliminate cash bail entirely, with preliminary data showing no spike in crime. In New Jersey, bail reform led to a significant drop in pretrial detention without negative public safety impacts.
Despite this broader trend, Reisig has positioned himself as a national critic of bail reform, and now, as a local DA lending credibility to Trump’s federal rollback. For critics, his willingness to provide fuel for the White House’s agenda shows that his opposition to zero bail is less about evidence and more about politics.
“Ultimately, compared to 2018 and 2019, crime was down in 2020 and 2021 according to the DA’s data, yet he insists that Zero Bail is responsible for more than twice as much crime,” the Vanguard reported in 2023. “I don’t know what data Reisig’s study used to determine ‘recidivism under the emergency zero bail program was much higher than the rate for those who had previously posted some form of bail’ but, like I said, I sure would like to see it.”
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