Pretrial service agencies managed influx after bail reform: CUNY report
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A new CUNY report determined that Pretrial Service Agencies managed an influx of individuals to pretrial supervised after bail reform passed. Eagle Photo by Jacob Kaye
By Ryan Schwach
When New York passed bail reform legislation in 2019, it drastically changed how legal systems in the state operated, and in particular, who could go to jail and for what. With fewer people being sent to jail to await trial, more began to be given pretrial supervision, which with the added influx of individuals, some worried that it would overwhelm those agencies who manage pretrial services.
A recently released study from the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance shows that those worries may have been mostly unfounded, with pretrial services mostly keeping up with the demand, despite some challenges.
According to the report, the number of individuals under pretrial supervision in New York City in 2020 was just short of 8,000. In 2021, that number nearly doubled, and a year later 28,000 were under pretrial supervision.
The ISLG said “supervision, in particular – is one of the systems that are essential to effective bail reform efforts.”
Pretrial supervision is an alternative to incarceration, and has the potential to lead to lower rearrest rates among individuals who go through it as opposed to those who await trial in jail, and in New York City’s case, Rikers Island.
Specifically, Jennifer Ferone, one of the report’s authors, says that pretrial supervision leads to a 93 percent no rearrest rate in New York City.
“We wanted to kind of unpack what were the lessons learned during this process, what were the critical factors of success that really facilitated implementation efforts? Where did the challenges exist?” said Ferone. “For us, it was really about the implementation process.”
What they found was the city and pretrial service agencies had enough of a foundation to manage the higher numbers of individuals under supervision, albeit with needing to hire more employees, and employees with more specialized skills.
“The sheer volume of people served in New York City created a unique set of implementation needs and challenges, particularly with respect to staffing, coordination, and changing population,” the report suggested.
“Given the nature of the bail reforms and the fact that certain charges were no longer eligible for bail, that meant that the composition of the population also needed to expand and evolve in supervised release,” said Ferone. “A lot of the supervised release providers that we spoke to talk about this changing population and the fact that they needed to kind of plan for a population that quite frankly had higher service needs in terms of mental health, homelessness and substance use, and that they needed to implement different training techniques and hire different staff that had more specialized areas of expertise.”
Ferone said that agencies they spoke to needed to drastically increase their hiring rate, but once they did, they were able to keep up with demand.
“They had to hire, one of the agencies told us they had to hire over 150 staff just to ramp up for the changes,” she said. “ So it's not that they didn't struggle with resources, but at least they had the foundation and the structure here in this city to make that expansion more successful because they already kind of knew what they needed to get going with this.”
The benefits of this, ISLG says, more individuals were able to have better experiences pretrial, which in turn led to those lower rearrest rates,
“We talked to individuals that were in pretrial supervision services in the city and they had nothing but great things to say about their experience and how it helped them throughout the criminal legal process,” said Carla Sinclair, a communications associate at ISLG. “They clearly state, we were able to stay connected with our families, stay connected with our jobs, not lose these really important connections to the community that only further exacerbate further criminal legal contact.”
“If the city was not able to keep up, what we would likely see is that individuals would likely potentially end up back in the criminal legal system,” she added.
Going forward, ISLG members say that more resources need to be given to these agencies to expand their work, and make it easier for more individuals to get an alternative to pretrial jail time.
“We want to make sure that there are appropriate services in place to meet the needs of that population and meet them where they are,” said Ferone, who added that more agencies are adding de-escalation training and Narcan training to their staff to manage different populations. “I think like just always filtering more resources to these programs so they could keep up with this volume.”
