Reform in Action: Taking an On-the-Ground Look at New York State Criminal Justice Reform Implementation
By Aimee Ouellet, Research Analyst
To examine how criminal legal system agencies put the 2019 Criminal Justice Reform legislation—which includes changes to bail, appearance tickets, discovery, and pretrial services—into practice, ISLG is conducting a process evaluation of these implementation efforts. Our latest fact sheets dive into how agencies approached planning during the first several months of implementation, their perspectives on the successes and challenges of the changes, and the impacts on system processes and outcomes.
The changes bail reform made to the criminal legal system has been a flashpoint for debate, but little is actually known about what’s happening on the ground. In New York, the conversation around the 2019 legislation that reformed bail and other pretrial policies mainly focuses on how the legislation impacted judges and police officers, and subsequently public safety and crime rates. But behind the noise lies the fact that there is little data on how the criminal legal system agencies put the various provisions into practice.
In general, stakeholders—such as prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement, and service providers—generally subscribed to the spirit of the legislation, which is to reduce reliance on pretrial detention to achieve equity. However, operationalizing it into everyday practice was not an easy task. To better understand how stakeholders are adopting the legislative components—and the level to which they are able to achieve the intended outcomes—Arnold Ventures supported the CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance (ISLG) to conduct an in-depth process evaluation examining implementation of the legislation, with particular interest in the provisions regarding appearance tickets, bail, pretrial services, and discovery. This occurred amid a particularly challenging landscape, made even more so by the COVID-19 pandemic just three months after the legislation went into effect. This week, we released the first two of five fact sheets synthesizing our on-the-ground analysis, with the goal of filling in the gaps by providing insight on how stakeholders are practicing these reforms in their everyday work.
Check out the fact sheet summarizing all initial findings.
Check out the fact sheet digging deeper into appearance ticket reform.
Check out the fact sheet exploring bail reform.
In the coming months, we will be releasing adjoining fact sheets that explore the reforms to cash bail, pretrial services, and discovery reform.
What is a process evaluation, and why is it important?
Process evaluations focus on how a program or policy is implemented and operates, documenting the procedures and decision-making required to get it up and running. This is used to assess reasons for successful or unsuccessful performance, providing guidelines for potential future replication. ISLG’s process evaluation of New York’s Criminal Justice Reform Act, enacted in 2020, is critical to assess and document how agencies are putting the provisions into practice, including any specific policies or directives that ensure compliance with the law. This compliance is especially important given the significance of the reforms and their implications for pretrial outcomes and, more broadly, criminal legal system operations.
Each jurisdiction may operationalize the provisions in slightly different ways, and a process evaluation will shed light on the challenges and successes that come from these variations.
Under New York’s law, the legislative provisions act as a guide for what stakeholders must consider when developing their own approaches to adhere to the reforms. Each jurisdiction may operationalize the provisions in slightly different ways, and a process evaluation will shed light on the challenges and successes that come from these variations. In turn, we can identify what strategies work in achieving the intended outcomes of the legislation and share information to fine-tune any New York-specific processes as well as provide other jurisdictions with a model for how to successfully create similarly focused bail reform policies and practices.
ISLG’s Research Strategy
Using a variety of data collection activities, our research aims to understand how stakeholders adopted the legislation and to pull out larger lessons learned across sites about what facilitated or impeded successful implementation. Successful implementation, for the purpose of this study, refers to a site having established policies and practices to aid in complying with the legislation, and that the adoption of these policies and practices achieved the intended individual- and system-level outcomes. These outcomes included:
standardizing and increasing the use of appearance tickets;
reducing the use of cash bail;
maintaining public safety and high rates of appearance in court; and
making case processing more efficient.
Additionally, given one of the legislative goals is equity across pretrial decisions, we are seeking to understand how participating stakeholders promote racial justice in their policies and practices. This exploration is coupled with documenting how the COVID-19 pandemic and revisions to the legislation impacted implementation across the state.
While COVID-19’s impacts on implementation are documented in our findings to date, the pandemic also had implications for our study design which relied on researchers being flexible, adaptable, and creative in a number of respects.
What did we expect?
Significant variation in how the reform provisions would be operationalized and received across counties and within agencies.
Variation in operational impacts of the reforms, challenges faced by agencies in planning and implementing operational changes necessary to comply, and perceptions of and openness to the reforms.
Variation to be driven mostly by differences in criminal legal system processes in place prior to legislation, interpretation of legislation, extent of planning efforts, and coordination across stakeholders, and resources/capacity.
What did we collect?
CUNY ISLG reached out to 129 relevant agencies by phone and email to assess interest in participating, aiming to obtain both leadership and line staff perspectives from a variety of stakeholder groups across a diverse range of counties. To date, we have interviewed 202 participants in 28 agencies in 13 counties from different regions—including a mix of rural, urban, and suburban. In the first round of interviews, questions focused on planning efforts, operational or policy changes, shifts in staffing, expectations early in the process, and experiences implementing the reforms. During the follow up period, which began in spring 2022 and will continue through the end of the year, questions are focused on how implementation has been going a minimum of one year since we last spoke to them, and what stakeholders have done, if anything, to combat some of the challenges mentioned in their initial interviews.
To supplement what participants said in interviews, we reviewed documents provided by several agencies that were developed for implementation of the reforms and train staff. For further context, we collected data from several of the agencies and relied on publicly available data, such as data from the Office of Court Administration. The data are not used to prove or disprove participant statements, but rather to better understand the perceived impacts of the legislation and broader trends of the criminal legal system post-implementation.
Next Steps
CUNY ISLG is continuing to keep a finger on the pulse of current narratives surrounding bail reform, working to add insights to the conversation that show how implementation of the legislative requirements are playing out on the ground. Our ongoing series of fact sheets document the findings from the initial round of interviews, highlighting stakeholders’ experiences planning for and implementing the legislative provisions across the substantive areas of appearance tickets, bail, pretrial services, and discovery. In addition, we expect to publish the findings from a media content analysis in Spring 2023, which will examine media coverage of New York’s bail reform legislation. The analysis will explore how the media may have potentially influenced public perception of the reforms, and the impact these perceptions had on public safety and people involved in the criminal legal system. The project will conclude with a final report documenting the full process evaluation, associated findings, and emphasizing lessons learned and considerations for policymakers as they grapple with how to effectively implement bail reform, particularly in the context of increased criticism around impacts on public safety. With these data and resources soon to be available, we hope to foster meaningful, fact-based discussion about reform that works for everyone in the community.