Former New York City prosecutor Jim Quinn, a vocal critic of New York’s 2019 bail law since day one, still hopes state lawmakers face reality and repeal the damaging law.
Quinn is a former executive assistant district attorney at the Queens District Attorney’s Office, one of five district attorney offices in New York’s five boroughs. He worked as a Queens prosecutor for 42 years.
His report came as the debate over criminal justice laws heats up in New York.
Recently, two high-profile Democrats—New York mayor Eric Adams and Albany County district attorney David Soares—joined Republican forces to plead for a special legislative session to fix bail reform and raise the age law, respectively.
So far, Gov. Kathy Hochul and state senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins showed no appetite for it.
“Through this report, I’m trying to get the debate onto something logical and reality. If my numbers are wrong, show me that my numbers are wrong,” Quinn told The Epoch Times.
In April 2019, five months after Democrats regained control of both legislative chambers and the governorship in New York, they crammed major criminal justice laws into the annual state budget.
The new laws are often called bail reform because it eliminates cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.
For those offenses, defendants are to be released after arrest without paying any money.
Advocates pushing the changes say that cash bail punishes poverty and needs to be done away with.
Before the new law took effect, Quinn, a Queens prosecutor at the time, did some data digging to find out how many Queens defendants were locked up in New York jails solely because they couldn’t afford bail.
The number was 398 in June 2019. Among them, 41 percent were held for violent A and B felonies, 33 percent for nonviolent D and E felonies, and 7 percent for misdemeanors, according to the report.
Those held for nonviolent felonies and misdemeanors typically had long arrest records, averaging 14 and 12, respectively, based on the data in the report.
Those numbers confirmed a long-time observation of Quinn’s: New York judges had used their discretion under the old bail law to set bail on low-level offenders who had long arrest records, indirectly protecting the community from more crime.
Most other low-level offenders were released from jails.
“There is no way you could look at this rationally and think that you could release career criminals and expect no impact on crime,” Quinn said.
Early implementation of the new law started in Oct. 2019. In Jan. 2020, New York City jails held 5,809 inmates, a reduction of about 2,000 compared to the month when the law was passed.
Affected offenses include robbery, burglary, grand larceny, drug sale, and car theft.
“If I woke up one morning and found that 2,000 people had escaped from Rikers Island, I would be terrified. I cannot think of anything like that has happened in my 42 years in office,” Quinn said.
By Mar. 2020, in New York City, robbery went up by 33.9 percent, burglary by 26.5 percent, grand larceny by 15.8 percent, and car theft by 68 percent, compared to a year ago, according to the report.
The year before that, between Mar. 2018 and Mar. 2019, those offenses had been decreasing.
Quinn didn’t include the months following the pandemic in the comparisons to stay clear of aberrational factors.
New York governors and lawmakers had attempted to fix the bail law twice by allowing judges to set bail on more offenses under particular conditions. The latest fix occurred in April.
However, in the real world, those extra conditions still make it hard for judges to set bail on repeat offenders, Quinn said. Plus, a large pool of offenses remains non-bailable, he said.
Since the pandemic, crime in New York has been on an upward spiral.
New York lawmakers supporting the bail law often relied on a two percent figure: between Jan. 2020 and June 30, 2021, only two percent of defendants got rearrested for a new violent felony while their cases were pending.
But Quinn questions the logic behind the calculation. He said to accurately measure the impact of the bail law, the focus should be on those who would have bail set under the old law but not under the new law, not the entire defendant population, which dramatically dilutes the results.
Quinn felt his views were often ignored by state lawmakers on the bail law debate, just like city lawmakers ignored his views on closing the Rikers jail years earlier, he said.
“The city wanted to close Rikers Island, and it became such a political issue that it really didn’t look at the actual effects. Anybody who opposed the closing of Rikers was called a racist, and that shut a lot of people up. The debate just became poisoned,” Quinn said.
“Another problem is that we lost the PR war because they have this far-fetched notion that district attorneys are these evil people who are only interested in locking people up,” Quinn added.
He said the 2019 bail law grew out of the momentum to close the Rikers jail and ramp up supervised releases in New York City, all driven by advocates under the slogan of “ending mass incarceration.”
“They created a narrative, and the narrative became true.
“The fact is that the Rikers population had been going down for years before these movements. We had a lot of services and programs that we used to keep people from going to jail,” he said.
“But there does come a point where some of these people will never help themselves unless there is a threat of them being sentenced to jail or put in jail on bail.”
“I just think it is important for people to look at this logically, and that is all I am asking for,” Quinn said.
