City’s Jail Population Rises After Bail Reform Gets A Rewrite
arrow Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock
After years of steady decline, the city’s jail population started going up this year. More than 4,700 people were in jail in November, compared to 3,800 at the end of April, based on the latest complete data available from the city. The majority are people who ve been accused of a crime but were not able to pay bail while waiting for their cases to play out in court.
That’s still much lower than the nearly 7,000 people in jail at the end of 2019. But it’s not what was expected in the year when New York enacted a groundbreaking new bail reform that prohibited judges from setting bail on most offenders, except those charged with violent felonies.