Category: In the News
MSNBC: A victory in bail reform for criminal justice advocates
A nationwide movement for bail reform scored a significant victory on Wednesday, as America’s largest city announced a new initiative to reduce the number of people it forces to await trial behind bars. Starting next year, New York City will spend $17.8 million to supervise an estimated 3,000 low-risk defendants, instead of requiring them to […]
Vice News: NYC to Eliminate Bail for Many Non-Violent Offenders
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is set to announce an overhaul of the city’s bail system on Wednesday that is designed to keep low-level offenders out of Rikers Island. The plan, which offers 3,000 offenders supervised release in lieu of bail, will help “reduce both the financial and human costs of needless incarceration,” […]
The Guardian: New York City foster care: stories from children and parents the system failed
Nearly a decade later, Angelo Clement vividly remembers the phone call that changed his life. The then 14-year-old high school freshman was home alone on a school night in his small one-bedroom apartment in midtown Manhattan, where both he and his mother lived, when a teacher called looking to speak with his mother. Clement told […]
ABC News: NYC Council Members: Suicide Points to Need for Bail Reform
The death of a 22-year-old man who hanged himself after spending three years as a teen jailed without trial should spur New Yorkers to push for bail reform, City Council members said at a hearing Wednesday. City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said Kalief Browder’s death “has been a wake-up call for many in our city […]
Observer: New York State’s Top Judge: Bail System ‘Totally Ass-Backwards in Every Respect’
In a country where criminal defendants are innocent until proven guilty, Kalief Browder spent three years in jail awaiting trial on charges of stealing a backpack when he was 16, because he couldn’t afford bail. The charges were eventually dismissed and Browder, who was never convicted of anything but had served a lengthy sentence, was […]
Slate: The Problem with Bail
Former Bronx Defenders Trial Chief David Feige writes in Slate about the problem with the bail system and one simple way to fix it: On Sunday, John Oliver devoted the majority of his HBO show to America’s broken bail system. “Bail” is the cash or property equivalent demanded of arrestees as surety—an assurance that they […]
New York Magazine: How All New Yorkers Killed Kalief Browder
In his short eulogy of Kalief Browder, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that the teenager’s death — he hanged himself with an air-conditioner cord in his home in the Bronx, after three years of torment by the legal system — “must necessarily be laid at the feet of the citizens of New York, because it […]
City Limits: Correction Dept. Slows Bid to Restrict Rikers Visits
A move to restrict visiting rights on Rikers Island—billed by the Department of Correction as a necessary step to control violence—that faced opposition from legal rights groups went nowhere Tuesday at a meeting of jail regulators. The Board of Correction decided to hold off on the proposal pending further study. The Board is considering whether […]
Newsday: NYC may set up taxpayer-paid bail fund for low-level offenses
City Council leaders want to create a $1.4 million, first-of-its-kind city-financed bail fund to spare indigent defendants charged with low-level crimes from unfair and costly stretches of confinement at Rikers Island before their day in court. But criminal justice experts are divided on how effective a reform that would be, while one of the city’s […]
Gotham Gazette: Through Committee, Bill to Create Office of Civil Justice Heads Toward Law
New York City is one step closer to having a new Office of Civil Justice. On Tuesday, the City Council’s Committee on Courts and Legal Services unanimously passed a bill that would create the office, to be tasked with assessing, coordinating, and helping reform the civil legal services available to low-income New Yorkers. Among the […]