The talk series brought together researchers and on-the-ground stakeholders from across the criminal legal field—including advocates, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and service providers—to reflect on New York’s sweeping changes to its criminal legal system, five years after the legislation has passed.

Though policymakers are responsible for establishing the policy frameworks, local agencies and practitioners — court officials, law enforcement, prosecutors, service providers and defense attorneys — are ultimately the ones who carry them out. Their buy-in during the legislative process can ensure policies in theory reach their intended goals in practice.

New York’s sweeping criminal legal reforms went into effect just three months before the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought about its own unique set of challenges. As part of a qualitative process evaluation of how changes were implemented on the ground, we had to quickly adapt our methods to safely and meaningfully interview practitioners as well as interpret data that was now more nuanced.

Changes to New York’s criminal legal system in 2019 involved multiple provisions that touched many facets of the system, but its expansion of pretrial services as an alternative to pretrial detention precipitated significant policy and operational changes. Pulling from a process evaluation of its implementation, here are some recommendations for pretrial service providers to manage the shift.

As part of the overarching goal of creating a fairer and more equitable criminal legal system, the 2019 New York Criminal Justice Reform Act made sweeping changes to how evidence was shared between prosecutors and defenders. Pulling from a process evaluation of its implementation, here are some recommendations for prosecutors to manage the shift.

The talk series brought together leaders from across the criminal legal field, including prosecutors, defense attorneys, former judges, and service providers to discuss how to safely reduce reliance on incarceration while keeping the community safe.

In New York, the conversation around the 2019 legislation that reformed bail and other pretrial policies mainly focuses on how the legislation impacted judges and police officers, and subsequently public safety and crime rates. But behind the noise lies the fact that there is little data on how the criminal legal system agencies put the various provisions into practice.

While “dangerousness” assessments are touted as an effort to reduce reliance on pretrial detention by detaining only those deemed a risk to public safety, very little is known about whether these considerations in bail decision-making would reliably decrease pretrial detention or reduce racial and ethnic disparities, the very two things the original legislation was meant to address.

Support for bail reform has grown across the country, with many jurisdictions—in nearby states such as New Jersey and most recently in Illinois—enacting legislation to end or limit the use of cash bail. Research has shown that these types of changes do not negatively impact public safety.