In a recurring theme in the debate over New York’s criminal-justice reforms of recent years, the outfit Data Collaborative for Justice offers a new study meant to show the no-bail laws worked — when its numbers indicate the exact opposite:
Among the most worrisome criminals, they boosted crime. To alarming rates.
As former Queens prosecutor Jim Quinn explains in The Post, the study — which focused on parts of the state outside the city — openly admits that two out three defendants freed under bail reform despite recent prior arrests got picked up for new crimes within just two years.
That telling number includes perps who’d been nabbed for violent felonies, then rearrested and released for committing new crimes.
And get this: Nearly half (49.3%) were hauled in for new felonies — a quarter (26.2%), violent ones.
Not only are the rates are up since bail reform, but they were troublingly high to begin with.
Oh, and with far more people being freed at higher rates, the total number of crimes they commit has soared.
It all adds up to overwhelming proof that bail reform has been an unmitigated disaster, not the success that the Data Collaborative and other progressives claim.
The group boasts that the reforms “tended to reduce recidivism for people facing less serious charges and with limited or no recent criminal history.”
Fine. Yet it also admits they “tended to increase recidivism for people facing more serious charges and with recent criminal histories” — that is, precisely the ones who account for most crimes, including the worst ones.
And “minor” crimes can add up to a plague.
Per NYPD stats, just 327 people were responsible for 30% of city shoplifting arrests in 2022. Bail reform created a revolving door for these repeat offenders, and retail theft is now killing shops large and small across Gotham.
Perps with priors are likely to re-offend if and when they’re released — not just because crime is simply the chosen career of many, but also because their repeated releases send the message that they’ll pay no consequences for their anti-social actions.
Let’s be honest: It’s no mere coincidence that crime shot up after the 2019 no-bail laws, which came after Albany had already relaxed other criminal-justice reforms, via measures like Raise the Age, and as the city passed more and more rules handcuffing cops.
Though some categories of crime have eased slightly in the past year or so, major felonies nonetheless still clocked in 24% higher last year than in 2019.
Shoplifting, thanks to repeat offenders freed on no bail, has gone through the roof.
Nor did it help that the city and state used the pandemic as an excuse for early release of thousands of career criminals.
The numbers don’t lie: Bail reform — as even researchers who support it quietly admit — has played a key role in fueling the recidivism that’s driving crime.