New Landmark Report by CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance Details Firsthand Experience of Agencies Tasked with Implementing the New York State 2019 Criminal Justice Reform Act
Study includes feedback on how provisions have shaped policies and practices, along with learned lessons to inform comprehensive legislative reform development.
NEW YORK, N.Y.—Today, the Institute for State & Local Governance at the City University of New York (CUNY ISLG), with support from Arnold Ventures, released a landmark new report “Reform in Action: Findings and Recommendations from a 3-year Process Evaluation of New York’s 2020 Criminal Legal Reform,” detailing how individuals and agencies across New York State prepared for and executed implementation of the 2019 Criminal Justice Reform Act, which aimed to move the system safely and equitably away from over-incarceration. Through interviews with 228 participants from 30 agencies in 13 counties across New York’s 62 counties, CUNY ISLG documented the successes and challenges faced by local and state entities around planning, connected available data and stakeholder feedback around the law’s impact to date, and identified concrete lessons learned from New York’s experience to inform policymakers in other communities exploring similar criminal legal reform.
While legislative changes to bail received the most media attention, there were a number of additional reforms incorporated into the Act to support its goals, including a requirement to issue appearance tickets for most misdemeanors and low-level felonies, enhanced pretrial service options, and changes to discovery law and procedure. The totality of these changes required stakeholders from numerous state and local agencies to quickly implement them. Overall, CUNY ISLG’s study found that implementation processes varied greatly across agencies depending on existing policies, practices, and infrastructure, including access to resources, data, and technology. As a result, local agencies reported a wide range of challenges, but also innovative solutions to overcome obstacles and successfully adhere to the new law.
A key theme voiced by practitioners was the desire for more timely coordination, communication, and guidance both from the state and between local counties and agencies, to better prepare for implementation of the law. Adding to these coordination challenges, the law had a limited runway of nine months for implementation and did not include additional funding to invest in staffing, data capacity, technology, or training. These challenges were true across each component of the legislation, including those that received less public focus like discovery reform in which a broader scope of evidence from prosecutors are now required to be shared with defense on an earlier timetable.
In a related media analysis conducted by CUNY ISLG on reform coverage, the shortened time frame for implementation and lack of resources may have also contributed to the generally critical coverage of the legislation, as there was not sufficient time to adequately prepare, address concerns, and educate the public about benefits of the law like reducing unnecessary pretrial detention and creating a more equitable, fairer criminal justice system.
Jennifer Ferone, Deputy Research Director at the CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance, said: “New York has invested nearly four years into creating a fairer and more equitable criminal legal system. With this report, CUNY ISLG is elevating the voices of practitioners who are on the ground, taking stock of the successes and challenges posed by this transformative law, identifying remaining gaps, and providing recommendations to support policy implementation moving forward. We hope that this report offers an honest assessment of the progress and the opportunities to make New York State – and other jurisdictions enacting similar reforms – more just for all.”
CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance Executive Director Michael Jacobson says: “The 2019 Criminal Justice Reform Act has led to important changes to our criminal legal system that reduces our reliance on unnecessary incarceration and lays the foundation for New York State to be a leader in more equitable outcomes. Through this report, we provide an opportunity to reflect on the implementation and impact thus far, and capture hard won insights from the people who have carried out this law firsthand. I am grateful to our team for their work documenting the experience from those on the frontlines and hope the lessons learned can serve as a practical resource for others exploring major legislative reforms in the future.”
In a series of interviews, focus groups, and follow-ups, participants provided feedback about their firsthand experience preparing for enactment of the 2019 Criminal Justice Reform Act and reflected on its implementation once it was in effect. CUNY ISLG researchers used these stakeholder interviews to distill key implementation themes as well as lessons learned for other policymakers and agency players exploring criminal legal reform. The following sections correspond with the three areas of focus contained in the report.
PREPARING FOR LAW ENACTMENT - Three themes emerged from participants reflecting on planning ahead of enactment of the 2019 Criminal Justice Reform Act:
Pre-Existing Alignment with Reform Goals - “...in this case, we were already planning some components of the legislation well before it was put into place.”
Agencies that already had aligned values and culture, such as those who were already implementing policies and practices that mirrored components of the legislation before the law had even passed, perceived the changes less dramatically and reported increased readiness across their staff.
NYC agencies were most pronounced in describing pre-existing alignment with many of the goals the legislation aimed to codify, particularly with respect to a reduced reliance on bail setting and alternatives to jail use like supervised release.
Existing or Flexible Funding, Data, and Technology Infrastructure - “It’s not reasonable to assume smaller agencies have the staff to do this…The State says it has no money, but they mandate things and that puts the counties in a bad position.”
The legislation did not provide additional funding and resources for city and county governments to draw upon to support implementation despite the fact that robust staffing structures, active data capacity, and up-to-date technology were emphasized by participants as key to implementation, particularly for the pretrial and discovery provisions.
Access to Coordinating Bodies for Training and Guidance - “We are fortunate in the county that there are solid and good working relationships between agencies and that helps tremendously.”
Counties that already had a strong multi-stakeholder coordinating body going into implementation planning said participation was key to collaboratively updating and troubleshooting policies and practices for this reform effort.
Local practitioners/agencies almost universally expressed that they desired more guidance from state-level agencies and departments, including when it came to judicial interpretation of the legislative requirements and how judges would rule on specific components of the reforms that were seen as vague or otherwise difficult to translate.
Agencies that appointed a dedicated staff member or members to lead trainings reported better preparation.
IMPLEMENTATION OF THE LAW ON THE GROUND - ISLG collected existing criminal legal data and gathered feedback from stakeholders to assess how the four components of the law changed operations and whether the law met the intended goals of reducing systemic inequities and harms in the criminal legal system.
Appearance Tickets: Mandating the issuance of Appearance Tickets (ATs) instead of custodial arrest for most misdemeanors and E felonies to reduce the use and impact of incarceration
Practitioners reported that overall the changes to AT issuance required fewer operational changes than other provisions, and therefore involved less planning and encountered fewer challenges during implementation.
Whether use of ATs instead of custodial arrests has increased as a result of the legislation is unclear. Though the proportion of arrests that resulted in an AT initially increased following the law, it has since declined back to pre-reform levels. However, there has been a slight impact on the number of felonies that are now issued an appearance ticket compared to pre-reform periods.
Bail: Restricting the use of cash bail for misdemeanors and most non-violent felonies so people aren’t kept in jail just because they can’t afford bail; and in cases where bail is still set, ensuring that judges consider a person’s ability to pay
Though data following passage of the law shows that the use of bail has decreased, bail continues to be unaffordable for many people.
The increased use of pretrial release and decreased use of money bail led some stakeholders, particularly those in law enforcement, to express concerns around community safety as crime rates in some categories rose. Recent data reports, however, indicate that jail populations have declined post-reform without negatively impacting crime or court appearance rates for those released pretrial.
Pretrial Services: Expanding the use of pretrial services and supervision to support the legislation’s requirement to subject people to the “least restrictive option” to ensure they return to court and avoid rearrest.
Based on DCJS data, there was an increase in the use of pretrial supervision post-reform across the state. For example, in NYC, there were roughly three times as many people in supervised release programming at the end of 2022 (8,082) compared to the end of 2019 (2,515).
Providers in NYC noted a shift in their populations as a result of the expanded eligibility and increased caseload volume, which indicated a need for additional resources and more tailored approaches to services – participants were presenting with more violent charges, and higher rates of mental health, substance abuse, and housing issues.
Despite these challenges, however, the majority of cases released pretrial–including those assigned to supervised release–are successful in meeting their court dates and remaining arrest-free during the pretrial period.
Discovery: Overhauling requirements to ensure that prosecutors share all available evidence with defense attorneys according to a strict timeline so they are better able to prepare their case, in compliance with the state’s speedy trial requirements
Defense stakeholders reported that as a result of this reform, more information was shared with them more quickly, leading to quicker case resolution – meaning people spent less time in jail and missing work, family events, or other prosocial engagements to attend court cases. They also noted they were able to discuss the facts of their cases much earlier and much more thoroughly with their clients and were able to have more information during the plea negotiation process.
Police departments and DA’s offices – including those who supported the goals of discovery reform – contemplated whether the amount of discovery and the short timelines on which they were required to share it were necessary to achieve fairer outcomes.
Prosecutors noted that changes in this area created many practical challenges, leading to staff burnout and turnover in their offices. Because of the wide range of materials that are now “discoverable” for cases - and could potentially disqualify a case if it was not provided to defense - many prosecutors were concerned that cases with strong evidence suggesting guilt could be dismissed due to missing discovery.
Law enforcement shared concerns that officers were working overtime to gather the required discovery to share with prosecutors.
In addition to the feedback on the specific provisions of the law, ISLG reviewed publicly available data to assess whether the legislation met its equity goals and the extent to which study participants intentionally strategized around these goals during planning. While it is cause for celebration that reliance on detention has declined for all racial and ethnic groups, disparities remain, causing disproportionate harm for low-income BIPOC, particularly Black people. There was a somewhat misplaced assumption across many stakeholders that simply implementing the legislation, as written, would produce the intended results and automatically result in a reduction in racial and ethnic disparities. In practice, disparities have actually increased after the law went into effect.
LESSONS LEARNED BASED ON STAKEHOLDER FEEDBACK - Taking together the participant responses regarding on-the-ground implementation and how outcomes have tracked towards intended goals of the law, CUNY ISLG developed four recommendations for planning and implementing a major statewide criminal legal reform effort.
Facilitate Greater Coordination Between State and Localities through “practitioner and policy champions'' to ensure stakeholder buy-in, the establishment of a dedicated task force to inform policy development, and public hearings featuring people with lived experience and the general public to provide feedback and perspectives on initial policy frameworks. Coordination should also consist of more training and written resources from state authorities.
Establish Mechanisms to Assess Ongoing Reform Efforts and Promote Transparency by instituting a broader data informed structure the State can use to assess implementation and share that information back to its localities and the broader public.
Provide Localities with the Funding and Time Necessary to Support Implementation Planning to ease logistical burdens and allow agency stakeholders time to workshop different scenarios. Other states implementing bail reforms provided much longer runways before legislative change went into effect – Illinois and New Jersey, for example, provided more than two years to prepare for change. Additional funding, while potentially useful across jurisdictions, could have been apportioned based on existing infrastructural capacity to help counties with the least resources.
Implement Concrete and Specific Strategies for Advancing Equity to ensure that efforts to reduce disparities are actually achieving their intended goals. Despite the law’s goal of reducing racial, ethnic, and wealth-based disparities at pretrial decision points, data from the reforms in New York suggest that disparities have in fact increased, despite declining pretrial populations.
About CUNY ISLG:
The City University of New York’s Institute for State & Local Governance (CUNY ISLG) is a good governance think-and-do tank driven by the idea that data-informed approaches can measurably improve the way government and public institutions operate, equitably serve all constituents, and ultimately solve social policy problems. Since 2013, ISLG has worked with communities across the country to develop and implement the necessary research, policies, partnerships, and infrastructures to help government and public institutions work more effectively, efficiently, and in the interest of all communities.
The Report’s Data Collection and Methodology can be found here: