Opinion: Hochul’s bail plan undermines safety and progress

Governor Kathy Hochul. File photo by Darren McGee/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul

By Zoë Adel

Governor Kathy Hochul claims to care about the safety of our communities, but her lip service is going to cost people their lives. The governor is yet again holding the state budget hostage in order to push through harmful changes to New York’s bail laws.

This time, she’s going after the long-held standard that judges set “the least restrictive” condition that “will reasonably assure [a person’s] return to court” when making release decisions pre-trial. Proposing this misguided change and politicizing the important issue of public safety will undermine the progress New York has made towards increasing fairness while maintaining safety.

At Envision Freedom Fund, we care deeply about safety, which is why we continue to fight tirelessly for the protection of bail reform and the freedom of all people. We won’t stand for a governor who claims to care about our communities while trying to push through a policy that will put more Black, brown, poor and immigrant New Yorkers behind bars. The vast majority of people currently in New York jails are Black and brown. The governor’s proposal would not only open the door for judges to deepen racial disparities through biased decision-making, it would upend decades of legal precedent.

The truth is, bail reform has strengthened our communities by allowing thousands of New Yorkers to sleep in their own beds at night, pick their kids up from school and support their families by retaining their jobs—without increasing crime in New York. Yet, Governor Hochul is pandering to the false claim that judges do not currently have enough discretion to prevent — supposedly in the name of public safety — people from being released without spending time in jail pretrial or having to meet the enormous burden of paying bail.

Since bail reform was enacted, Envision Freedom has watched through our Court Watch program as judges exercise their discretion, using carve outs in the law to send people to jail for everything from robbery to shoplifting and fare evasion.

They’ve skirted around requirements in the law, resulting in average bail amounts towering at $33,500 during the first half of 2022. Governor Hochul’s proposal would remove all accountability and transparency for judges, leaving them with no standard to guide their decision making.

This will not only generate widespread confusion among judges where there currently isn’t any, it will condemn more people to dangerous and potentially deadly pretrial jailing across the state, despite the fact that jail is ineffective at preventing or reducing crime, and that people released pretrial overwhelmingly return to court and seldom get rearrested.

Research overwhelmingly shows that incarceration exacerbates unaddressed trauma, mental health issues, and instability, which undermines the safety of those in our community, both outside and behind bars.

While the governor is aware of these facts, the average New Yorker might not be. Law enforcement and certain elected officials, including New York City Mayor Eric Adams, have been feeding New Yorkers an overwhelming amount of bail reform misinformation for the past three years. While this fear may make for catchy headlines, it ignores fact and fails to make any of us safer.

Governor Hochul’s proposed overhaul of bail reform is a dangerous distraction from the need for solutions that can actually achieve safety for all New Yorkers. If New York’s elected leaders are as serious as they claim to be about improving safety and fairness, they must remain steadfast in their efforts to prevent an expansion of the harmfully ineffective pretrial detention system and use this year’s budget to make critical investments in life-affirming solutions, such as housing, mental healthcare, drug treatment and employment opportunities.

Zoë Adel is the research and advocacy manager at Envision Freedom Fund.