Research Funded by Arnold Ventures Aims to Illuminate the Impact of New York's Sweeping Bail Reform
Arnold Ventures is committing $5.5 million to help four expert organizations document how statewide changes to the criminal justice system are implemented — and how effective they are — amid a challenging landscape.
On April 1, 2019, NYS passed a comprehensive package of criminal justice legislation representing a major shift in how the state’s 62 counties will make pretrial decisions. Most notably, the legislation eliminates money bail and pretrial detention for the majority of misdemeanor and nonviolent felony defendants, but these reforms will also usher in major changes for law enforcement. In particular, law enforcement agencies will have to accommodate provisions requiring officers to issue an appearance ticket (an arrest order to appear for arraignment, or first appearance in court; individuals are able to go home until the date noted on their ticket), in lieu of taking a defendant into custody for misdemeanors and Class E felonies. The law is set to take effect on January 1, 2020 and represents a significant shift in practice and resource allocation for jurisdictions across the state.
Given the significance of these reforms and their implications for criminal justice operations and pretrial outcomes, it will be critical to understand and evaluate both their implementation and impacts. With the funding from Arnold Ventures, ISLG will carry out a three-year process evaluation of the criminal justice reform package, with a particular focus on the implementation of provisions related to appearance ticket requirements. This evaluation is part of a collaborative of research projects that are exploring the impacts of the legislation from multiple perspectives.
ISLG’s process evaluation will explore—through a combination of interviews, focus groups, observations, and aggregate quantitative data collection—how criminal justice agencies in up to 13 diverse sites around the state have adopted the legislation, including the kinds of mechanisms employed for ensuring appearance in court. Participating counties will be confirmed in early 2020. Additionally, ISLG will assess how the shift in practices and other legislative provisions affect a range of criminal justice system stakeholders who will be involved in implementing the reforms, including law enforcement, court, and pretrial operations staff. Shifts in practices will be explored both immediately after legislative enactment and over the longer-term, with a focus on exploring changes in practices that may occur as a response to these legislatively required shifts in addition to how the provisions themselves are being operationalized. Ultimately, the goal of the evaluation is to identify and document larger lessons learned across sites regarding factors, circumstances and/or strategies that facilitated (or hindered) successful implementation.
The project presents a tremendous opportunity to document and understand how to advance effective pretrial reform, both on its own and through its contribution to a broader body of research on the implementation of NYS’s criminal justice reform bill.
Read more about the research here, or contact Jennifer Ferone, Associate Research Director, at Jennifer.Ferone@islg.cuny.edu for more information.