Few criminal justice debates generate more heat and less light than bail reform. Advocates promise liberation from a system that punishes poverty. Critics warn of dangerous criminals flooding the streets. Both sides marshal statistics, often cherry-picked, to support predetermined conclusions.

The empirical reality is considerably more nuanced than either camp acknowledges. Several major jurisdictions have now accumulated years of data on what actually happens when cash bail disappears or diminishes. New Jersey eliminated cash bail in 2017. Washington D.C. has operated without monetary bail for decades. Illinois became the first state to fully abolish cash bail in 2023.

These natural experiments allow us to move beyond ideology toward evidence. What do the numbers actually show about court appearance rates, pretrial crime, and the distribution of liberty? The answers challenge comfortable assumptions on both sides while revealing genuine trade-offs that honest policy analysis must confront.

New Jersey's 2017 bail reform provides the most comprehensive data set for evaluation. The state replaced cash bail with a risk-based release system. Pretrial jail populations dropped by 44 percent in the first three years. This represented thousands of people who previously languished in jail simply because they couldn't afford bail.

Critics predicted catastrophe. The actual outcomes proved more complicated. Failure-to-appear rates remained essentially stable, hovering around 15 percent—virtually unchanged from the pre-reform era. Pretrial crime rates showed modest increases in some categories but remained within historical ranges. Violent crime specifically showed no statistically significant increase attributable to bail reform.

Washington D.C. offers an even longer track record. The District has operated without money bail since the 1990s. Approximately 85 percent of defendants are released pretrial. Among those released, roughly 88 percent avoid rearrest while awaiting trial. Court appearance rates exceed 90 percent for most offense categories.

These numbers don't prove bail reform is costless. They demonstrate that predictions of public safety collapse were empirically unfounded. The evidence suggests that cash bail's primary effect was keeping poor defendants incarcerated, not meaningfully separating dangerous defendants from safe ones. Risk assessment, despite its flaws, appears to perform comparably to wealth-based detention.

Takeaway

When evaluating bail reform claims, demand jurisdiction-specific data over at least three years rather than accepting anecdotes or national crime trends that confound multiple variables.

Algorithmic risk assessment has become bail reform's uncomfortable partner. When jurisdictions abandon cash bail, they typically adopt some form of actuarial tool to guide release decisions. These tools predict the likelihood of pretrial failure using factors like criminal history, age, and employment status.

The tools' accuracy is genuinely limited. Most instruments correctly identify high-risk defendants about 65-70 percent of the time—better than chance but far from certain. They perform worse at the extremes, sometimes flagging low-risk individuals as dangerous and occasionally missing genuinely high-risk defendants.

Bias concerns are legitimate but often overstated. Studies consistently find that criminal history—itself shaped by discriminatory policing—drives most racial disparities in risk scores. When researchers control for arrest records, racial gaps in scores narrow substantially. This doesn't eliminate the concern but locates the problem upstream in policing rather than in the algorithm itself.

The relevant comparison isn't between risk tools and perfection. It's between algorithmic assessment and the alternatives: judicial intuition influenced by implicit bias, or wealth-based detention that systematically disadvantages poor defendants regardless of actual risk. Research suggests judges using validated tools make somewhat more consistent decisions than judges relying on unstructured judgment alone. The tools are imperfect instruments, but imperfection must be measured against realistic alternatives.

Takeaway

Evaluate risk assessment tools against the realistic alternative of judicial intuition plus wealth-based detention, not against an imaginary system of perfect prediction.

The core indictment of cash bail isn't primarily about public safety outcomes. It's about the relationship between money and liberty. Defendants with identical charges and identical risk profiles experience radically different pretrial experiences based solely on their bank accounts.

Research consistently documents this disparity. A study of Philadelphia's bail system found that defendants who could pay bail within three days had dramatically better case outcomes than those who remained detained. The detained group faced more pressure to plead guilty, received longer sentences when convicted, and suffered collateral consequences including job loss and family disruption.

These effects compound existing disadvantages. Pretrial detention disrupts employment, housing, and family relationships. Defendants who lose jobs while jailed often plead guilty simply to be released, accepting convictions and consequences they might have avoided through trial. The system creates a self-reinforcing cycle where poverty leads to detention, detention leads to worse outcomes, and worse outcomes deepen poverty.

This isn't a side effect of cash bail. It's the primary mechanism. Money bail doesn't sort defendants by danger—it sorts them by wealth. Reform doesn't eliminate the need for pretrial detention of genuinely dangerous individuals. It asks whether financial resources should determine who experiences that detention. The evidence suggests that separating wealth from liberty doesn't meaningfully compromise public safety while substantially reducing systematic injustice.

Takeaway

When someone argues that bail reform releases dangerous criminals, ask them to explain why ability to pay $5,000 should be the mechanism separating the detained from the released.

Cash bail reform reveals a persistent tension in criminal justice: the gap between intuitive assumptions and empirical outcomes. The evidence from reform jurisdictions doesn't support either triumphalist or catastrophist narratives.

What the data actually shows is more modest but important. Eliminating wealth-based detention doesn't collapse public safety. Risk assessment tools work imperfectly but not worse than the systems they replace. The primary effect of cash bail was always sorting by wealth rather than danger.

Honest policy analysis requires acknowledging genuine trade-offs. Some pretrial crime may increase marginally. Some defendants will fail to appear. The question is whether these costs outweigh maintaining a system where liberty depends primarily on financial resources rather than actual risk assessment.