In an effort to address the significant number of accused offenders waiting in jail before their trial date, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced a new program that reforms the city’s bail procedures for certain defendants.
According to MSNBC, New York, beginning in 2016, will spend about $18 million to divert 3,000 low-risk defendants to court supervision, in lieu of posting bail or being incarcerated before their trial. Such supervision includes regular in-person or text message “check-ins” from agents of the court, as well as possible behavioral or drug counseling, depending on the alleged offense.
It’s important to emphasize that this program targets lower-risk defendants for possible release, not those accused of more serious crimes, or those at a risk to re-offend upon release. Programs like these can ease jail populations and eventually save money, but the paramount concern must always be preserving the public safety.
Which is one such result of New York’s new initiative, states Right on Crime Director Marc Levin:
“Defendants who can keep their jobs because they’re not in jail will pose less of a threat to the public than those who end up unemployed.
Indeed. Beyond allowing these defendants to maintain employment opportunities while they await adjudication, diverting lower-risk defendants away from jail populations that also harbor more serious offenders can help prevent exposing them to a culture of criminality often found in such populations. Mixing the two together, in a perverse twist, runs the chance that the former would become a greater risk to the public later on than when they first entered the system. For obvious reasons, this is not a preferred outcome, making programs like New York’s a sensible approach towards alleviating problems in the long run.
The entire MSNBC article can be found here.