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Date: November 22, 2024 Fri
Time: 12:03 pm
Time: 12:03 pm
Results for bail (new york city)
3 results foundAuthor: Phillips, Mary T. Title: Making Bail in New York City: Commercial Bonds and Cash Bail Summary: This research examined bail making by defendants in New York City in a sample of cases with an arrest in 2005, focusing on the role of commercial bonds. The report concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings, suggesting several strategies that could lessen defendants' growing reliance on bondsmen. Details: New York: New York City Criminal Justice Agency, Inc., 2010. 98p. Source: Internet Resource Year: 2010 Country: United States URL: Shelf Number: 118716 Keywords: Bail (New York City)Bail BondsmenCommercial BondsPre-trial Release |
Author: Phillips, Mary T. Title: Commercial Bail Bonds in New York City Summary: This report expands upon a recent study of bail making by the New York City Criminal Justice Agency, Inc. (CJA), which found that bail bondsmen play a much larger role in New York City than they did 30 years ago Research Brief #23, 2010). Commercial bail bonds are the most common form of pretrial release throughout the country, but for decades New York City has been different. Release on recognizance (ROR) accounts for two thirds of releases at arraignment in NYC. And when bail is set, it is more likely to be made by posting cash directly with the court than by posting a bond. However, the use of commercial bonds has increased in New York City in recent years, to well over 3,000 bonds annually. For cases with bail set at $1,000 or more, commercial bonds account for one in five bail releases. Defendants buy bonds because the amount of cash required up front can be considerably less than would be needed to post cash bail. The drawback is that a bond is much more expensive in the long run because cash bail is refunded. In addition, the bondsman can revoke the bond, sending the defendant back to jail, without giving the courts a reason. Citywide data are presented describing characteristics of bond agents, insurance companies, and co-signers. The research focused primarily on the financial aspects of commercial bonds and identified significant borough differences. These findings were used to devise a tool — the “effective cash discount” — that would enable the courts to set cash alternatives at a level calculated to remove the financial incentive for posting a bond rather than cash, tailored to the borough and bond amount. The report concludes with several recommendations, including use of an effective cash discount, that would lessen reliance on bondsmen. Details: New York, NY: CJA New York City Criminal Justice Agency, Inc., 2011. 8p. Source: CJA Research Brief No. 26: Internet Resource: Accessed on January 29, 2012 at http://www.cjareports.org/reports/brief26.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://www.cjareports.org/reports/brief26.pdf Shelf Number: 123879 Keywords: Bail (New York City)Bail BondsmenCommercial BondsDefendants |
Author: Phillips, Mary T. Title: A Decade of Bail Research in New York City Summary: A decade-long research project examining the bail system in New York City has recently been completed by the New York City Criminal Justice Agency, Inc. (CJA). The research was conceived in the context of CJA’s mission of reducing unnecessary pretrial detention, and it continued in the midst of a national debate about the role of bail and the commercial bail bond industry in the criminal justice system. With the publication in 2011 of the last of a series of reports from this research, it is now time to take stock of what we have learned, and to consider how the findings might inform the ongoing public discussion. This final report of the bail project synthesizes the major findings, with the dual objective of making the research results more accessible by gathering them together in one place, while also introducing a level of clarity that is difficult to achieve when disparate findings are viewed only as separate pieces. The bail research began in 2002 with a pilot project to determine the feasibility of collecting data from courtroom observations that would be of use in examining the factors that enter into judges’ decisions to release or set bail for defendants at arraignment. The first published report from that study appeared in 2004. Findings from each phase of the research raised further questions, leading us to expand the study to investigate the part played by the prosecutor in the judge’s bail decision, the role of commercial bonds in bail release, the association between release type and failure to appear (FTA), and the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes. All together, eight full reports and seven Research Briefs were published between 2004 and 2011 presenting the results of the bail project. They are listed together in a separate section at the beginning of the References, and all are available on CJA’s website at www.nycja.org/research/research.htm. (Two additional unpublished reports, also listed in the References, are not on the website.) Two chapters included here are not based on any of the previously published reports. One of them (Chapter III) situates the New York City bail system within the country as a whole, comparing state bail statutes and presenting nationwide data pertaining to release and bail. This chapter provides essential context — not only for understanding how New York compares in release and detention of pretrial defendants, but also for understanding why national bail reform efforts occasionally focus on conditions that do not apply here. The other chapter with new material (Chapter IV) presents current baseline data on release and bail in New York City, separately for felony and nonfelony cases, including the setting of cash alternatives. The research summarized in Chapters V through VIII used datasets that were compiled between 2002 and 2005. Chapter IV, along with a more detailed table in Appendix B, provides updated data describing release and bail in New York City as of 2010, the most recent year for which data were available. CJA’s concerns about the uses and effects of bail can be traced to the Agency’s origins in the early 1960s. Upon learning that large numbers of impoverished defendants were held in New York City jails awaiting trial — for no other reason than that they lacked money for bail — industrialist Louis Schweitzer established the Vera Foundation in 1961 to address this inequity. The Vera Foundation (now the Vera Institute of Justice) launched the Manhattan Bail Project, in conjunction with the New York University School of Law and the Institute of Judicial Administration, to study the feasibility of release on recognizance (ROR) as an alternative to bail. The Manhattan Bail Project showed that defendants with strong ties to the community would usually return to court without bail, and as a result of that research Vera developed a recommendation system based on objective community-ties information obtained by interviewing defendants. Since that time, the Vera recommendation system has served as a model for pretrial services programs nationwide, and ROR has replaced bail as the dominant form of release in New York. The Vera recommendation system was administered by the NYC Probation Department until 1973, when the Pretrial Services Agency (PTSA) was created to take over its administration. In 1977, PTSA became independent from Vera and was incorporated as the New York City Criminal Justice Agency. From its inception, CJA has been responsible for interviewing virtually every defendant shortly after arrest to collect information that is used to calculate an objective score reflecting the estimated risk of nonappearance. The score provides the basis for assigning a recommendation category, which is provided to the court to assist in the release decision at arraignment. The Agency is constantly reviewing and monitoring its recommendation system, which is described in detail in Appendix A. Data presented in each year’s Annual Report show that the recommendation is effective in persuading judges to release low-risk defendants (Exhibit 12), and — no coincidence — that it is also effective in predicting which defendants are most likely to return to court without bail (Exhibit 18). The system was overhauled in 2003, and a new research project was recently launched to improve its predictive accuracy even further. In spite of the success of the recommendation system in establishing ROR as the primary release type in New York City, judges are not bound by it, and in fact they are required to consider other factors as well. As a result, there are many cases in which the recommendation is not followed. Every year thousands of defendants who were recommended have bail set, and an even larger number who were assigned to the highrisk category are released without bail.1 This observation formed the starting point for the bail project, which began by investigating the question of what — other than the CJA recommendation — influences judicial release and bail decisions. This and related issues addressed by CJA’s bail project have gained in importance as local and national criticism of the system of money bail has grown in recent years. U.S. jails are increasingly filled with pretrial detainees, as release rates drop and reliance on bail rises across the country (Clark 2010). Media and watchdog organizations have begun to put a spotlight on the shortcomings of the bail system in New York City, publicizing the plight of the thousands of New Yorkers “stuck behind bars because they’re too broke to get out,” as the Village Voice put it (Pinto 2012; see also Murphy 2007, Liptak 2008, Fellner 2010, and Eligon 2011a, 2011b). In December 2011 the New York County Lawyers Association held a public forum to discuss the topic.2 On a wider stage, a three-part National Public Radio series in January 2010 introduced the general public to the sad stories of people arrested for minor offenses and jailed for lack of bail money in Lubbock, Texas (Part 1), New York City (Part 2), and Broward County, Florida (Part 3). In the second part of the series, Martin Horn — then New York City Commissioner of Correction — commented on the difficult choice faced by individuals who do not wish to plead guilty and cannot afford bail. “‘Individuals who insist on their innocence and refuse to plead guilty get held,’ according to Horn. ‘But the people who choose to plead guilty get out faster’” (NPR 2010). In the most important development to date, Attorney General Eric Holder, together with the Pretrial Justice Institute, convened a National Symposium On Pretrial Justice on May 31 and June 1, 2011, in Washington, DC. Law enforcement officers, judges, prosecutors, public defenders, victims, elected officials, and pretrial organizations were represented. Calling the pretrial release decision-making process “deeply flawed,” symposium organizers called on participants to help find solutions (PJI 2011b). The symposium harked back to the 1964 conference convened by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to bring attention to the injustice that had so disturbed Louis Schweitzer a few years earlier. Kennedy, like Schweitzer, argued that money should not be the only thing that matters in determining whether a defendant avoids jail while awaiting trial (PJI 2011a; Schnacke, Jones, et al. 2010). The Kennedy conference culminated in the Federal Bail Reform Act of 1966, which led to the increased use of ROR across the country. It remains to be seen what concrete changes will result from the 2011 National Symposium, but a long list of recommendations came out of the proceedings, all of which reflect standards the American Bar Association has endorsed for many years (ABA 2007). The adoption of the recommendations in their entirety by New York would require major changes in the way release and bail decisions are made. We will return to this topic in the concluding chapter of this report, where we present the National Symposium recommendations and discuss what changes would be entailed in bringing New York into compliance. The role of the commercial bail bond industry in the U.S. forms a subtext to the public debate about bail. In some parts of the country (not New York) commercial bonds are nearly synonymous with release on bail, and the local pretrial service agency is responsible for supervising defendants on non-financial, conditional release. The bond industry has responded to this perceived competition for clients by launching an aggressive national campaign to discredit pretrial services agencies and to convince lawmakers and the public that bail bonds are the most effective form of release (see, for example, AIA 2010). In New York City, where the bond industry is relatively weak, it was unclear at the outset if enough bonds are posted here to conduct any meaningful research on their impact. However, the research soon revealed that bonds have regained a foothold in the City, enough to allow us to expand the bail project to include a study that eventually refuted some of the commercial bond industry’s claims. This study would have been much more difficult to do in areas of the country where virtually all bail release is by a commercial bond because it would be impossible to distinguish the impact of the bondsman from the impact of money bail itself. The most important findings from all the studies conducted as part of the bail project are grouped together in four chapters, addressing judicial decision making (Chapter V), bail release (Chapter VI), effects of release type on failure to appear (Chapter VII), and effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes (Chapter VIII). Most chapters summarize the findings from more than one report, and the order in which the research findings are discussed here is not necessarily the same order in which they were originally published. Many details, additional analyses, and discussions that were omitted here are included in the original reports. The reader is also referred to the original reports for full descriptions of the manual data collection procedures used to supplement data from the CJA database. Details: New York: New York City Criminal Justice Agency, Inc., 2012. 171p. Source: Internet Resource: accessed September 13, 2012 at: http://www.cjareports.org/reports/DecadeBailResearch.pdf Year: 2012 Country: United States URL: http://www.cjareports.org/reports/DecadeBailResearch.pdf Shelf Number: 126322 Keywords: Bail (New York City)Pretrial DetentionPretrial Release |