Tag: Court

Borough Contrast: Prosecution and Court Outcomes Across New York City, 2021-2024

“Borough Contrast: Prosecution and Court Outcomes Across New York City, 2021-2024,” analyzes how criminal legal outcomes vary across the five boroughs during the post-pandemic period (pp. 1, 4).

Below are the key highlights and trends identified in the study:

1. Sharp Rise in Low-Level Arrests

Citywide arrests surged by 62% from 2021 to 2024 (pp. 9, 14). This was driven largely by low-level offenses:

  • Fare Evasion: Increased more than elevenfold (900 to 10,125 arrests) (p. 4).
  • Other Charges: Drug, trespass, and petit larceny arrests all approximately doubled citywide (pp. 4, 13).
  • Borough Leaders: Brooklyn saw the largest increase in misdemeanor (+88%) and nonviolent felony (+73%) arrests, while the Bronx saw the highest spike in violent felony arrests (+49%) (pp. 4, 13).

2. Disparate Prosecution Decisions

Whether a case is prosecuted depends heavily on the borough (pp. 6, 23):

  • The Bronx: Consistently held the highest “declination” rate (refusal to prosecute), declining 40% of misdemeanors and 25% of violent felonies in 2024 (pp. 5, 22-23).
  • Manhattan: Saw a massive shift under DA Alvin Bragg, with misdemeanor declinations rising from 6% in 2021 to 31% in 2024 (pp. 5, 22).
  • Other Boroughs: Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island declined significantly fewer cases, with Queens declining only 6% of misdemeanors in 2024 (pp. 5, 22).

3. Pretrial Release & Bail

The study found significant differences in how judges handle cases at arraignment (pp. 6, 31):

  • Bail Setting: Queens and Manhattan had the highest bail-setting rates for felonies (pp. 6, 31). In 2024, Manhattan judges set bail/remand in 53% of violent felony cases (p. 31).
  • Ability to Pay: By 2024, bail payment rates at arraignment were exceptionally low (4–6% for misdemeanors), meaning a bail order almost always resulted in immediate incarceration (pp. 6, 36).
  • Supervised Release: Judges citywide increasingly relied on supervised release over “Release on Recognizance” (ROR) for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies (p. 33).

4. Convictions and Sentencing

  • Conviction Rates: Criminal convictions remain rare for misdemeanors (only 5% citywide in 2024) (pp. 7, 38). However, for indicted felonies, conviction rates were high, reaching 95% for violent felonies in Staten Island (pp. 7, 39).
  • Prison Sentences: There was wide variability in prison time for felonies. In 2024, 34% of convicted felony cases in Manhattan resulted in state prison sentences, compared to only 12% in Queens (pp. 7, 42).
  • Demographic Disparity: Even after controlling for charge and history, Black and Hispanic individuals were significantly more likely than white individuals to be sentenced to prison (p. 43).

Access the article webpage HERE

Ger a .PDF copy of the article HERE

Criminal Risk Assessment and the Character Trap

People born in different years, even not that far apart, have wildly different outcomes.

Over the past three decades, successive birth cohorts in the United States have come of age in very different worlds of crime and its control. These shifting contexts shape people’s life chances in ways that challenge the belief in stable, individual propensities to commit crime and in timeless rules for predicting risk. Focusing on the life course of different birth cohorts — on when we are rather than who we are — reveals the power of the birth lottery of history.

This matters because common risk-assessment practices pervade the criminal justice system and extend well beyond it. Formal risk instruments are used to inform pretrial release and probation decisions, while criminal history information is used in sentencing, employment screening, tenant screening and occupational licensing. With the emergence of AI tools and large-scale databases, predictive risk assessment is accelerating.

But prognostications like these rest on assumptions of an individual’s stable criminal propensity or character. New research exposes the perils of this approach, revealing how rapidly changing times challenge common notions about prediction and enduring propensities to commit crime.

Read more HERE

“Brady Lists” by Rachel Moran

Interesting article on “Brady Lists” by Rachel Moran

INTRODUCTION

Brady lists, named after the Supreme Court decision Brady v. Maryland, are lists some prosecutors maintain of law enforcement officers with histories of misconduct that could impact the officers’ credibility in criminal cases. Brady and its progeny require prosecutors to disclose exculpatory evidence within the government’s possession or control to defendants in criminal cases. This includes evidence that could impeach a witness’s credibility. Evidence that a police officer involved in a criminal case has, for example, previously written a false police report, lied in court, or used racial slurs during an arrest may be exculpatory because it casts doubt on the officer’s truthfulness, credibility, and impartiality. Brady lists originated from this disclosure obligation: the lists ostensibly allow prosecutors to keep track of, and disclose to defense counsel when necessary, information that negatively impacts officers’ credibility.

Access the full article HERE

The cumulative risk of jail incarceration

Research on incarceration has focused on prisons, but jail detention is far more common than imprisonment. Jails are local institutions that detain people before trial or incarcerate them for short sentences for low-level offenses. Research from the 1970s and1980s viewed jails as “managing the rabble,” a small and deeply disadvantaged segment of urban populations that struggled with problems of addiction, mental illness, and homelessness. The1990s and 2000s marked a period of mass criminalization in which new styles of policing and court processing produced large numbers of criminal cases for minor crimes, concentrated in low-income communities of color. In a period of widespread criminal justice contact for minor offenses, how common is jail incarceration for minority men, particularly in poor neighborhoods? We estimate cumulative risks of jail incarceration with an administrative data file that records all jail admissions and discharges in New York City from 2008 to 2017. Although New York has a low jail incarceration rate, we find that 26.8% of Black men and 16.2% of Latino men, in contrast to only 3% of White men, in New York have been jailed by age 38 y. We also find evidence of high rates of repeated incarceration among Black men and high incarceration risks in high-poverty neighborhoods. Despite the jail’s great reach in New York, we also find that the incarcerated population declined in the study period, producing a large reduction in the prevalence of jail incarceration for Black and Latino men.

Access the report HERE