"The study found a 15% drop in guilty pleas, combined with a 17% reduction in the likelihood of a jail sentence and 15% drop in convictions, which the study’s authors say indicates that fewer innocent people are serving time for crimes they didn’t commit."
AUGUST 30, 2022
by Fola Akinnibi
A federally mandated change in the misdemeanor bail policy of Harris County, Texas, has resulted in fewer low-level offenders in jail and improved public safety, according to a new study.
The bail reforms in the county that includes Houston, ordered five years ago as part of a consent decree, have resulted in a 13% increase in people released within the first 24 hours of a misdemeanor arrest and a 6% decrease in new prosecutions over the three years following arrest, indicating that releasing these defendants doesn’t increase recidivism, according to the study by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania.
“This idea that when you release people charged with these low-level crimes you’re going to harm public safety, the data doesn’t support that at all,” said Paul Heaton, academic director at the Quattrone Center and the lead researcher on the study. “You can fix this and you can do it in a way that doesn’t compromise public safety, it doesn’t compromise accountability, it ratchets back the cost of the criminal justice system.”
The study looked at 517,000 cases in the Harris County judicial system between January 2015 and May 2022 to assess the impact of a federal consent decree that eliminated cash bail for most people charged with misdemeanors. The study found a 15% drop in guilty pleas, combined with a 17% reduction in the likelihood of a jail sentence and 15% drop in convictions, which the study’s authors say indicates that fewer innocent people are serving time for crimes they didn’t commit.
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