Bail Reform and Risk Assessment Tools: The Case of New Jersey

• In Event: Issues Related to Bail and Pretrial Practices

Abstract

The state of New Jersey has been the location for a pre-trial release experiment since they passed the bail reform in January 2017, shifting from a system that relied principally on setting monetary bail as a condition of release to a risk-based system, unrelated to the defendant’s inability to pay.

The main purpose of the study, whose preliminary results will be presented, was to analyze the impact of the bail reform implemented in the State of New Jersey on the resulting outcomes, with the goals that the reform posed itself when the law was passed: reducing the system’s unfairness and the jail population.

Drawing on data collected in the project “Blind Spots: the practice of justice in arraignment courts in the US and Latin America” directed also by Prof. Andres Rengifo, I collected a new series of observations using a similar instrument that the one applied to register hearing in Jersey City prior to the reform, to compare and contrast the arguments used by the parties and the judge’s decisions with the current situation, using a quasi experimental design.

Author

• Ana Clara Piechestein, Rutgers University