But experts say it is incorrect to claim that there is an adverse connection.
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By clicking Sign up, you agree to ourprivacy policy. “I don’t know of any valid studies corroborating the President’s claim and would love to know what the Administration offers in support,” said Kellen Funk, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies pretrial procedure and bail bonding. “In my professional judgment I’d call the claim demonstrably false and inflammatory. ”
Jeff Clayton, executive director of the American Bail Coalition, the main lobbying arm of the cash bail industry, also pointed to a lack of evidence. “Studies are inconclusive in terms of whether bail reforms have had an impact on overall crime numbers,” he said. “This is due to pretrial crime being a small subset of overall crime.
It is also difficult to categorize reforms as being ‘cashless’ or not, i. e. , policies where preventative detention is introduced as an alternative to being held on bail. ”
In 2023, Illinois became the first state to completely eliminate cash bail when the state Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law abolishing it.
The move was part of an expansive criminal justice overhaul adopted in 2021 known as the SAFE-T Act.
Under the change, a judge decides whether to release the defendant prior to their trial, weighing factors such as their criminal charges, if they could pose any danger to others and if they are considered a flight risk.
Loyola University of Chicago’s Center for Criminal Justice published a 2024 report on Illinois’ new cashless bail policy, one year after it went into effect.
It acknowledges that there is not yet enough data to know what impact the law has had on crime, but that crime in Illinois did not increase after its implementation.
Violent and property crime declined in some counties.
A number of other jurisdictions, including New Jersey, New Mexico and Washington, D.
C. , have nearly eliminated cash bail or limited its use.
Many include exceptions for high-level crimes. 🔗 Read Full Article
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