NEW YORK — A new report from the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College finds that New York’s 2020 bail reform law did not lead to higher crime rates, countering a core claim made by opponents of the policy.
A report titled “Examining the Impact of Eliminating Bail on Recidivism in the New York City Suburbs and Upstate Regions” takes a close look at how the law affected re-arrest rates across the suburbs and upstate regions. The study uses a difference-in-difference design to compare how people charged with bail-eligible and bail-ineligible offenses were affected before and after the reform.
The report, led by DCJ researchers and authors Stephen Koppel and Rene Ropac, found no overall increase in re-arrests after bail was eliminated for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. However, there were short-term increases in re-arrests among individuals considered “high risk,” those who already had another pending case at the time of the arrest. “During the immediate pretrial period, eliminating the option to set bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies had no overall impact on recidivism,” the report notes.
The study focused on the law that took effect in January 2020, which stopped judges from setting bail in most nonviolent cases. It later faced criticism and partial rollbacks in July of that year. Still, DCJ researchers stress that the initial change was one of the most significant criminal justice reforms in New York’s history.
According to the report, researchers used statewide data from the Division of Criminal Justice Services and the Office of Court Administration to track re-arrests for up to six months pretrial and over a two-year period. The “treatment” group included cases where bail was no longer allowed, while the “control” group consisted of charges that remained bail eligible.
Lead analysts said their method helped account for broader trends like shifting crime rates and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted arrest and court patterns across the state. “By controlling for changes in individual-level background characteristics as well as adjusting for county and month fixed effects over the study period,” the authors explained, “we sought to correct for any biases potentially resulting from shifting crime trends and/or arrest practices in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In the short term, results showed a 6.6% increase in re-arrests for the high-risk group and a 5% rise in felony re-arrests. However, over a two-year follow-up period, the trend shifted in favor of the reforms. Those whose cases were no longer eligible for bail had lower felony re-arrest rates overall.
The researchers caution that the early pandemic months may have skewed results slightly upward, since reduced case volumes and court delays could make short-term changes appear larger than they were. But even after controlling for those factors, the long-term data remained consistent: people released without bail did not commit more crimes than those whose charges allowed bail.
The DCJ study concludes that New York’s 2020 bail reform law did not lead to an overall rise in re-arrests, challenging early claims that eliminating bail would increase crime. While some higher-risk individuals initially showed a small uptick in re-offending during the pretrial period, this effect disappeared over time.
Over a two-year span, those released under the reform were actually less likely to face new felony charges compared to those who remained subject to bail. Overall, the DCJ’s findings suggest that expanding pretrial release can promote fairness without compromising public safety.
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