Brennan Center Report: No Statistical Evidence that Bail Reform Affects Crime Rates

By Mary Alice Miller
The Brennan Center for Justice recently issued an investigative report that found there is no evidence that bail reform affects crime rates. The report “Bail Reform and Public Safety, Evidence From 33 Cities” is the first national study that looks at how reforms to the bail system undertaken by some cities and states have affected crime rates.
The report discredits theories linking bail reform to recent increases in crime.

According to the study, the findings hold true “even when distinguishing among various types of crime and various types of reform. These findings reinforce studies about individual jurisdictions that have found little, if any, relationship between bail reform and crime. They show that political attacks on bail reform lack a foundation in evidence.”

During a public announcement of the study, Mireya Navarro, editor-in-chief for the Brennan Center for Justice’s Spanish language counterpart, cited the case of Sandra Bland, who was driving from Illinois to Texas for a new job when a state trooper pulled her over for failure to signal a lane change that minor encounter escalated. “She ended up in jail and frantically tried to find someone who would help her post bail of $5,000. She had a new job to go to, but three days later, she was found hanged in her jail cell,” said Navarro.

Ames Grawert, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Justice Program who leads research on trends in crime and the collateral cost of mass incarceration, recalled Kalief Browder, a young man who spent several years in Riker’s Island for suspicion of stealing a backpack until the charges were dropped. “He spent several of those years in solitary confinement,” said Grawert. “ When he left Riker’s Island, unfortunately, he took his own life and died by suicide, and due in part it’s believed to the trauma that he experienced on Riker’s Island.”

Grawert added, “When we talk about reforming our bail system, we’re really talking about making sure that injustices like this do not happen ever again. And that people are not exposed – especially exposed unnecessarily – to the hardship of jail, we know from our research that jail can lead to very extreme, long-range consequences. People can lose a job. People can lose housing. They can lose the ability to live with their children.”

Navarro said, “In the United States you are innocent until proven guilty, but jails are full of people who shouldn’t be there, and one of the main reasons is because they don’t have the money to make bail. The system favors those with money, so many states have changed their laws to allow more people with less ability to pay to get out while they wait for their cases to be heard.”

Prompted by the increase in violent crime during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, critics of these bail reforms blamed them for that spike. The Brennan Center decided to investigate, comparing crime rates in states that undertook bail changes and states that didn’t, to see what effect bail reform really had on crime.

Using FBI Uniform Crime Reports between 2015 and 2022 the Brennan study found that bail reform cities had average crime rates for index crime – murder, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, and larceny rates – were lower than non-reform cities.

If there is a relationship between bail reform and crime rates, then that effect would be most pronounced in cities with bolder reforms that substantially reshape bail policy.

For all types of reform, the Brennan Center found “no statistically significant difference in post-reform crime trends. These results held when evaluating their effect on rates of crime generally, as well as on property crime, violent crime, and larceny. We then assessed the cities — Buffalo, Chicago, Houston, Newark, and New York City — where reforms had the largest impact on how and when bail was set.

We compared crime trends in these five cities against cities that had not enacted bail reform and dropped the other cities that had implemented reforms from the sample. Once again, no statistically significant effects emerged.”
Craigie added, “One thing that’s changed since we set out to start with this study is that violent crime rates are now declining.”

The Brennan report posits that more study is needed “to test other theories about how bail reform may interact with crime. For instance, it is possible that reform could lead to increases in crime that take several years to materialize. But it could also lead to long-term reductions in crime. Misdemeanor bail reform could shift enforcement resources away from lower-level offenses and toward more serious ones.

Pretrial supervision programs, which are often created or expanded alongside bail reform, could reduce pretrial rearrests if implemented with adequate funding and with an eye toward avoiding an increase in supervision of people who would previously have been released. Bail reform could also reduce the collateral consequences of incarceration that, by preventing people from attaining the basic necessities of life, make recidivism more likely. These theories, which are unlikely to be observed in the relatively short period studied here, are worth testing as more data becomes available.”

The report stated that “the best explanations for the mid- pandemic spike in violent crime lie beyond bail policy, as do the best solutions to reduce violent and property crime. Policymakers tasked with ensuring public safety should focus on addressing specific social and policy problems that worsened during the pandemic and continue to this day. They should, for example, expand access to mental health and substance abuse treatment programs.”

Grawert said, “The goal of bail reform is not to make it so that judges can’t consider public safety. But it is to remove money from the equation. Someone should not be sent to jail for want of $500 in their bank account.”