The mission of the NYC Criminal Justice Agency (CJA) is “to assist the courts and the city in reducing unnecessary pretrial detention.” To further this goal, CJA has provided pretrial services to the justice-involved population as well as research and technical support to criminal justice stakeholders for over 40 years.

One of the advantages of CJA’s ongoing commitment to pretrial justice is the ability to offer context to important issues. The implementation and subsequent rollbacks of bail reform legislation in NYC in 2020 has been among the most controversial changes in recent years and is still the focus of contentious discussions.

Much of the media attention devoted to issues surrounding bail reform has focused on differences in bail setting practices before and after the initial bail reform law took effect and after its revisions. The analyses of bail reform are also challenged by the impact of COVID-19. The pandemic shutdowns decreased the volume of arrests and court processing celerity. This post contributes to discourse about bail but avoids those challenges in that it explores bail setting in a different context: specifically, we map arraignment bail setting in 2022 by the residential ZIP codes of the justice-involved individuals and suggest the intersection between bail setting and poverty.

Maps by ZIP code of residence:

Bail was set in 5,546 of the 49,825 summary (not DAT) arrests prosecuted (docketed) in 2022, 11%. The first map displays bail set as a proportion of all prosecuted summary arrests citywide, standardized per 10,000 prosecuted summary arrests.  The second map shows the data filtered by violent felony arrests and non-violent felony arrests. Finally, we present a third map showing poverty levels by ZIP code, using data on the poverty status of households in twelve months from the American Community Survey’s most recent data (2021).

DAT (desk appearance ticket) is a written notice to appear in court for arraignment at a future date. People who are issued a DAT are not held before arraignment.

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