Criminal Legal Reforms Didn’t Lead to Violent Crime. Saying They Did Distracts from Real Solutions.
By Michael Jacobson, Executive Director, and Sana Khan, Senior Research Associate
The following is an excerpt from an op-ed originally posted on Governing based on a CUNY ISLG report report written about Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) data. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the SJC helps jurisdictions across the U.S. implement data-informed strategies that reduce the misuse and overuse of jails and racial and ethnic disparities present across the criminal legal system. The CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance provides data and analytic oversight for the project.
It has been widely reported that violent crime — homicides in particular — has increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the numbers bear that out: According to FBI data, 2020 saw a 5 percent increase in violent crime and a 30 percent rise in homicides from the previous year, occurring in both urban and rural areas.
While the spike in violence is indisputable, its cause is still a flashpoint for debate, especially in the context of the pandemic’s many social and financial impacts. Despite this complicated picture, many people point to singular explanations, often without the data to back up their claims.
One such politically popular explanation blames criminal justice reforms. In particular, those who voice this argument point to the increased use of pretrial release — the practice of releasing people charged with crimes from incarceration as their cases await resolution. This is a reform strategy that many cities and counties had safely instituted years prior to the pandemic to reduce jail populations, and also one that many state and local governments, along with the federal government, leaned on during the pandemic to reduce the spread of the virus in jails and prisons.
In a time of social unrest and increased politicization, blaming reforms plays directly to fears that many of us have about safety. What is missing, however, is systematic evidence. These claims are largely based on anecdotal examples; when one examines the numbers more comprehensively, a completely different picture emerges. National crime data, for example, show that violence increased both in places that have enacted criminal legal reforms and in those that have not — in fact, all but two states experienced an increase in homicide rates in 2020. A study examining how crime changed after reform-minded prosecutors were elected also found no detectable effect on rates of major crimes, including murders.
Beyond that, for decades historical trends have shown that incarcerating more people does not lead to community safety. Louisiana, for one, has had the second-highest incarceration rate for the past 19 years as well as the highest murder rate for the past 35. At the other end of the spectrum, New York has seen the largest decline in the prison population of any state since the mid-1990s while also having the largest decrease in murder rates. These long-term incarceration and violent-crime trends are why many criminologists agree that incarceration is one of the least effective ways to reduce crime.
A new analysis by our organization, the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance (CUNY ISLG), provides the most direct evidence to date that criminal legal reforms did not lead to violence in the wake of COVID-19. This is grounded in perhaps the most comprehensive and detailed data so far, which tracked outcomes for people released from jail before trial in 16 cities and counties implementing reform strategies as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge, an initiative funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to safely reduce the overuse and misuse of jails across the country.