Bail and Pretrial
Nationwide, 62 percent of people in jail are not serving time, they’re waiting for justice to be served in cases that typically involve nonviolent charges. In one county jail over the course of a week, fully a third of people admitted were charged with traffic violations. America spends an estimated $22.2 billion annually to detain people in jails.
What if judges set bail amounts people could afford, or released them with no up-front payment? Bail shouldn’t function as punishment or coerce people to plead guilty, but these and other injustices are baked into the process. We’re working in New York City and nationally to address them once and for all.
Related Work
Empire State of Incarceration
February 18, 2021
The Impact of New York Bail Reform on Statewide Jail Populations
A First Look
New York’s recent bail reform law, which was passed in April 2019 and amended on July 2, 2020, was expected to reduce the footprint of jail incarceration by limiting the use of money bail. The new law mandated pretrial release for the vast majority of nonviolent charges and required that judges consider a person’s ability to pay bail. A comprehensi ...
Coalition to End Money Bond with the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice
Black and Grassroots Advocates Help Illinois Make History with Bill to End Money Bail
Images Courtesy of the Coalition to End Money Bond with the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice.
Blog Post
Insha Rahman
Alison Shih
New York State Bail Reform Evaluation Study
Since it was passed in April 2019, New York State’s bail reform law has received enormous attention from both its supporters and critics. Vera’s 3.5-year NYBRE study will provide comprehensive impact evaluations of the reform utilizing multiple research methods including administrative data analysis, court observations, interviews with system actor ...
Project
Jaeok Kim
People Need Relief from Court Fines and Fees—Even Beyond the Current Recession
Vera’s new research briefs show that in Florida and New York, the typical cost of fines and fees on a misdemeanor charge can easily surpass a month’s pay for someone making minimum wage. Yet these revenues are relatively modest to the governments that collect them, typically accounting for 1 percent or less of city and county budgets. We know that ...
Blog Post
Chris Mai
Election 2020
Justice Is on the Ballot
Two Ways to Show Up for Black Lives in the Wake of George Floyd’s Murder
Bail fund donations and overhauling the money bail system
As police respond to the current protests with more violence and arrests, bail funds have seen an outpouring of support—collectively raising upwards of $30 million from tens of thousands of donors across the country in a matter of days. Some bail funds, like the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund and the Minneapolis Freedom Fund, have received so many do ...
Blog Post
Insha Rahman
Justice & Humanity in a Time of Pandemic Webinar
Facing a crisis no one was prepared for, Vera's New Orleans office swiftly executed a three-part COVID strategy—including statewide education, data analysis, and communication with judges—to assist local and statewide actors in their understanding of what they should know and what they could do, and follow up to help where needed. Vera's New Orlean ...
On Bail Reform We Need Less Fear-Based Speculation—and More Data
Bail reform is working. But in a moment when many are questioning the impact of the new law, a lack of publicly available data in real time about other critical metrics—including crime and arrest rates—leaves open the door for bail reform opponents to highlight outlier cases and anecdotal information to claim that bail reform makes us less safe. We ...
Blog Post
Lauren Jones
Don't Let Fearmongering Drive Bail Policy
Crime in New York is at historic lows. Yet critics of bail reform, which went into effect on January 1, 2020, have been hard at work warning that bail reform endangers public safety—claiming that the law has led to a surge in crime. But, as these fact sheets demonstrates, it is far too early to reach any conclusion about the impact of bail reform.
Sticking with Bail Reform in New York
On January 1, 2020, New York ushered in a new bail law that delivers justice, fairness, and public safety. As a result, thousands of New Yorkers who otherwise would not have been able to afford bail, or only do so at great personal expense, have been able to keep their jobs, stay with their families, remain in school, and return to their communitie ...
A Means to an End
Assessing the Ability to Pay Bail
Research shows that money bail is unfair, ineffective, and disproportionately burdens people of color and those with low incomes; jurisdictions that no longer rely on money bail have excellent court appearance rates, fewer people in jail, and strong public safety outcomes. In April 2018, the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) developed and launched t ...