New York's 2020 Bail Law and the Fight Over What Happened Next

Albany has a habit of doing its biggest business in the dark. Late on March 31, 2019, and into the early hours of April 1, legislators in New York's capitol worked through the bills that made up the state budget, a negotiation that bundles spending with a grab bag of policy that leaders could not pass any other way. Tucked into that package was one of the most ambitious changes to pretrial justice in the country. Starting January 1, 2020, judges would no longer be allowed to set cash bail for most people charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. Instead those people would go home, with or without conditions, while their cases moved forward. Supporters called it the end of a system that jailed people for being poor. Within months of taking effect, it had become one of the most fought-over laws in American politics.

In short: New York's 2019 bail law, which took effect in 2020, required release for most people charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. Jail populations fell. Crime rose nationally in 2020 for reasons that had nothing to do with New York's law, but the reform became the target of a political backlash, and lawmakers amended it in 2020, 2022 and 2023. The research on rearrests is more encouraging than the politics suggest, and the episode carries lessons for reformers everywhere.

The boy on Rikers Island

Every reform has a face, and New York's had one that the state could not forget. In 2010, a sixteen-year-old from the Bronx named Kalief Browder was arrested and accused of stealing a backpack. He insisted he was innocent. Bail was set at an amount his family could not pay, and he was sent to Rikers Island to wait for trial.

He waited about three years. Much of that time he spent in solitary confinement. His case was postponed again and again. In 2013 the charges were dropped, and he went home without ever being tried. In 2015, at the age of twenty-two, he died by suicide.

Browder's story, reported in detail in the national press, turned an abstract policy debate into something concrete. It showed what pretrial detention can mean: not a few days in a cell before a hearing, but years of a young life taken over an accusation that was never proven. The movement to close Rikers and to change New York's bail laws grew in part from that story.

How bail worked in New York before 2020

The idea of bail is old and, in principle, reasonable. A person accused of a crime is presumed innocent. To make sure he returns to court, a judge can require him to post money that he forfeits if he does not show up.

In practice, for decades, New York judges set bail in amounts that many defendants simply could not pay. People with money went home; people without it stayed in jail, sometimes over a charge as minor as jumping a turnstile or possessing a small amount of marijuana. Those held in jail lost jobs, missed rent and were separated from children. And because they were in custody, they had powerful reasons to plead guilty just to get out, whether or not they were guilty.

New York's bail law also had an unusual feature that matters a great deal to this story. Unlike most states and the federal system, New York did not allow judges to consider whether a defendant was dangerous when deciding on release. The only legal question was whether the person was likely to come back to court. Lawmakers had kept it that way partly out of concern that "dangerousness" predictions are unreliable and fall hardest on Black and Latino defendants.

What the 2019 law changed

The new law did several things at once, and it is worth separating them.

Mandatory release for most lower-level charges. For nearly all misdemeanors and most nonviolent felonies, judges were required to release defendants, either on their own recognizance or with nonmonetary conditions such as check-ins or, in some cases, electronic monitoring. Cash bail was off the table for those charges.

Bail kept for serious charges. For violent felonies and certain other serious offenses, judges could still set bail or order detention as before.

Discovery reform. Prosecutors were required to share evidence with the defense much earlier and on firm deadlines, rather than holding it until right before trial. This change got less attention than bail but changed daily practice in courthouses.

Speedy trial rules. Changes aimed at making it harder for cases to sit for years, the problem that had trapped Kalief Browder.

The law did not add a dangerousness standard. That decision, as we will see, shaped everything that followed.

Then 2020 happened

The law took effect on January 1, 2020. Within weeks the backlash was loud. Police leaders, some district attorneys, tabloid headlines and many Republican officials highlighted cases of people released under the law who were quickly rearrested. A few of those cases were genuinely disturbing, and they were repeated constantly.

Then came the pandemic, protests after the police murder of George Floyd, and a sharp rise in violence. Murders rose nationwide in 2020 by roughly 30 percent, the largest one-year increase in modern national records. That rise hit states with bail reform and states without it, red states and blue states, cities with progressive prosecutors and cities with conservative ones.

But in New York, the bail law was the obvious local target. It had taken effect the same year. Its critics argued that releasing more people pretrial meant more crimes committed by people awaiting trial, and voters were primed to believe them.

Three rounds of rollbacks

The legislature amended the law three times in four years.

In April 2020, as part of that year's budget, lawmakers added a list of offenses back into the category for which judges could set bail, and made other changes, effective that summer.

In 2022, Governor Kathy Hochul pushed for and won changes allowing judges, for bail-eligible offenses, to consider factors such as the harm caused by the alleged crime, a defendant's history of using firearms and whether the person had violated orders of protection, and making more repeat offenses bail-eligible.

In 2023, again in the budget, lawmakers removed a requirement that judges choose the "least restrictive" means to ensure a defendant's return to court for serious charges, giving judges more discretion to set bail in those cases.

Each round was framed as a narrow fix. Taken together, they moved the law noticeably back toward judicial discretion, while leaving its core, mandatory release for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, intact.

Discovery rules have also been revisited since, with prosecutors arguing that the deadlines caused cases to be dismissed on technicalities and defenders arguing that early evidence sharing prevents wrongful convictions.

What the evidence says

Here the story gets more interesting than the headlines.

Jail populations dropped substantially after the law took effect. Fewer people were held on Rikers Island and in county jails across the state for being unable to pay. That was the law's central purpose, and it worked.

On rearrests, researchers at the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College studied people released under the reform and compared them to similar people before it. Their work found that for many groups, eliminating bail was associated with lower or similar rates of rearrest, not higher ones. The pattern was not uniform: results varied by charge and criminal history, and some subgroups, such as people with recent prior cases, showed less favorable outcomes. But the overall picture did not support the claim that bail reform drove New York's crime rise.

That finding fits a broader body of research suggesting that holding people in jail before trial can itself increase later offending, because it destabilizes lives, costs jobs and housing, and teaches people that the system is arbitrary.

None of that settles every question. Individual tragedies still happen under any system. A judge who sets bail can also be wrong, in either direction. The honest summary is that bail reform reduced jailing for poverty without the crime surge its critics predicted, while losing the public argument anyway.

How reformers lost the argument

It is worth asking why, because progressives have something to learn here.

The law passed in a budget at midnight. Bundling a major change into budget negotiations meant less public debate and fewer chances to build understanding before it took effect. When the backlash came, many voters were hearing about the law for the first time from its fiercest critics.

The dangerousness question was left unanswered. Reformers had principled reasons not to add a dangerousness standard. But a law that, by design, did not let judges consider whether a defendant posed a threat was easy to caricature, and the absence of any mechanism for the hardest cases left supporters on the defensive.

Implementation money lagged. Pretrial services, court reminders, supportive housing and mental health treatment help people return to court and stay out of trouble. Those systems were thin in many counties when the law began.

The timing was terrible. No one could have predicted a pandemic and a national spike in violence in the law's first year, but once they happened, the reform absorbed blame that belonged elsewhere.

The political costs were real. In the 2022 elections, crime was a central theme in New York. The Republican candidate for governor, Lee Zeldin, made bail reform a centerpiece of his campaign and ran closer than expected against Hochul, who still won. Republicans flipped several House seats in New York that year, contributing to their narrow national House majority. Democrats later debated how much of that was about bail and how much about other factors. Some of it surely was.

What a morning in arraignment court looks like now

Picture a busy arraignment part in a New York City courthouse. A steady line of people, most arrested within the past day, are brought before a judge. Each has a few minutes with a lawyer, usually a public defender, before the case is called.

Before 2020, for many of these people, the key moment was the bail decision. A prosecutor would ask for an amount; the defense would argue for release; the judge would set a figure. If the family could raise it, the person went home. If not, the bus to Rikers was waiting.

Today, for most misdemeanor and nonviolent felony charges, that moment looks different. The judge releases the person, sometimes with conditions, and gives a return date. Court reminder systems, which send text messages before each appearance, help people remember. For more serious charges, the old argument about bail still takes place, now with the factors added in the later amendments.

Something else changed that receives less attention: the defense lawyer now often has the prosecution's evidence much sooner because of the discovery reforms. That means she can tell a client earlier whether the case against him is strong or weak, and a person who is not sitting in a cell can afford to wait for that information before deciding whether to plead.

These are small mechanics. Together they change the whole tempo of a criminal case. A person who goes home can keep working, keep his apartment and help his lawyer find witnesses. A person in jail does none of those things, and often pleads guilty to get out. The difference between those two paths is what bail reform was meant to address.

The other side's best case

Critics of the law were not all cynics or fearmongers. Their strongest argument goes like this: a small number of people commit a large share of serious crimes, and some of those people will be arrested repeatedly while awaiting trial. A system that requires their release, without letting a judge weigh the risk they pose, invites harm to their neighbors, who are often poor and Black or Latino themselves. Victims and their families deserve to have that risk considered.

That argument deserves a direct answer. Here is ours. Most states that have reformed bail, including New Jersey and Illinois, answered it by pairing the end of money bail with a narrow, transparent process for detaining the few people who pose a serious risk, with a hearing, evidence and a lawyer. New York chose not to do that, for reasons rooted in fears about biased predictions. Those fears are legitimate. But a reform that cannot answer the hardest case in plain language is vulnerable. Detention should be decided openly, on evidence, not hidden behind a dollar amount that the rich can pay and the poor cannot. That principle works whether you start from civil liberties or from public safety.

What you can do

• Learn your own state's rules. Bail law differs dramatically from state to state. Ask your state legislators whether your state allows money bail for low-level charges and how detention decisions are made. You can find them through our representatives lookup.
• Support pretrial services. Court reminder programs, transportation help and community bail funds help people return to court. Our nonprofit directory lists justice reform groups by state, including some that work on pretrial support.
• Go to arraignments. Court-watching programs send volunteers to observe bail hearings and report what they see. If one operates near you, it is one of the most effective ways to make the system visible.
• Talk about the data, not just the anecdote. When a story about a rearrest appears, ask what the overall numbers show and compare with places that kept cash bail. Our criminal justice reform page follows the research and the politics.

Kalief Browder did not live to see the law his story helped inspire. What happened next in New York was messy, partisan and unfinished. It also kept thousands of people from losing their jobs and homes over charges they had not been convicted of. Both things are true, and a reform movement that can say both out loud is more likely to win the next round.