February 16, 2021

Pretrial Release Without Money: New York City, 1987-2020

Aubrey Fox and Stephen Koppel

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The rate of money bail declined by 32 percentage points

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The volume of money bail dropped by more than 70,000

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The rate of money bail fell for all crime severity categories

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The volume of money bail dropped in all crime severity categories, most sharply for nonviolent felonies

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The rate of release without money rose by 27 percentage points

Rate of release without money bail is the percentage of continued cases released without a monetary condition at arraignment (i.e., released on one’s own recognizance or Supervised Release).

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The rate of release without money rose in all crime severity categories

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The rate of Supervised Release rose to 11 percent

“even before 2020, New York City had already moved towards an embrace of nonmonetary forms of pretrial release.”