Speaker 1: Hi, it's West Kosova. We're taking a break this week,
Speaker 1: so here's an episode you might have missed. Thanks so
Speaker 1: much for listening. We'll be back on Monday with a
Speaker 1: new big take. There are currently about two million people
Speaker 1: incarcerated in the US, and at any given time, many
Speaker 1: of them are defendants who are being held in jail
Speaker 1: while they await their trial because they can't afford to
Speaker 1: pay bail. If you're charged with a crime, a judge
Speaker 1: will often set bail. It's an amount you have to
Speaker 1: pay to be released until you're day in court. It's
Speaker 1: intended as an insurance policy of sorts to make sure
Speaker 1: you show up, but often judges set bail so high
Speaker 1: that defendants aren't able to pay. The result they have
Speaker 1: to sit behind bars until trial, a process that can
Speaker 1: take months or even years. Bloomberg City Lab reporters Sarah
Speaker 1: Holder and Fulla a Kennedy report. That's one reason the
Speaker 1: US is the world's leading jailer per capita.
Speaker 2: The US is actually an outlier in its reliance on
Speaker 2: that system. In other places, bill bonds are illegal or
Speaker 2: an issue of last resort. But in the US, even
Speaker 2: though we have this credo and this belief that you're
Speaker 2: innocent until proven guilty. You can still be sent to
Speaker 2: jail under that presumption of innocence because you can't pay
Speaker 2: a certain amount of bail.
Speaker 3: This is a very American issue, the issue of mass incarceration.
Speaker 3: Over the past thirty or forty years, the number of
Speaker 3: people in jail pre trial has like quadrupled.
Speaker 1: This has led to what critics call a two tiered
Speaker 1: system of justice.
Speaker 2: People who are able to pay that bail are able
Speaker 2: to go home to their families, get back into the
Speaker 2: community and await that court hearing, and people without the
Speaker 2: means cannot.
Speaker 1: Sarah and Fola have been looking into what happens to
Speaker 1: defend in in New York City, where thousands of people
Speaker 1: charged with crimes each year face the choice of paying
Speaker 1: up or going to jail, and in New York, jail
Speaker 1: often means Riker's Island. It's the city's largest detention facility,
Speaker 1: and it's made news in recent years for violent and
Speaker 1: dangerous conditions. Twenty seven people have died there since the
Speaker 1: beginning of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 4: Another detainee died today at Rikers Island.
Speaker 5: The city's Correction Department says thirty three year old Donnie
Speaker 5: Ubieira was found unresponsive in his cell.
Speaker 1: But here's why we're talking about this now. The city
Speaker 1: is looking to change the system to make it more
Speaker 1: fair and to reduce crowding in jails.
Speaker 2: New York is trying to redesign its pre trial release
Speaker 2: program to get more people out of places like Rikers Island.
Speaker 2: New York has introduced an alternate approach called supervisor release,
Speaker 2: where a judge can say, go home, come back for
Speaker 2: your court date, but in the meantime, you're going to
Speaker 2: have regular meetings with social workers and case managers that
Speaker 2: can help you stay out of jail again and get
Speaker 2: your life back on track.
Speaker 1: I'm wes Kosova today on the Big Take. New York
Speaker 1: tests a real life get out of Jail card. New
Speaker 1: York City's supervised release program is run by four nonprofits,
Speaker 1: each covering part of the city. In Queens, that organization
Speaker 1: is the Criminal Justice Agency, or CJA. It's the job
Speaker 1: of the caseworkers at CJA to meet with defendants and
Speaker 1: try to help them keep their lives on track while
Speaker 1: they await their court date. Fulla and Sarah went to
Speaker 1: CJA's office in the Q Gardens neighborhood of Queens to
Speaker 1: see how the program works.
Speaker 3: When we visited the q Garden's office, it's across the
Speaker 3: street from the Queen's County Criminal Court and around ten
Speaker 3: or eleven am, that's when clients starts rolling and the
Speaker 3: office starts buzzing a bit. And on the day we
Speaker 3: were there, we saw one case for having to deal
Speaker 3: with unscheduled visits and having to do like three different
Speaker 3: sessions when she only had one schedule. And that's because
Speaker 3: of the office's proximity to the courthouse. It's easy for
Speaker 3: clients to walk across the street and pop in and
Speaker 3: do their check in when they finish a hearing.
Speaker 1: And Sarah, you met with some of the people who
Speaker 1: work at the program.
Speaker 2: We spoke to Joanna Jizeus, who runs CJA's Supervisor Release program.
Speaker 5: I'm the executive director of Supervised Release and I have
Speaker 5: been working with cj for twenty six years. I'd say, well,
Speaker 5: our general overall mission is to you know, it's to
Speaker 5: help the courts reduce unnecessary pre trialed attention, right, and
Speaker 5: the goal of this program was to help people return
Speaker 5: to court. I think here's specific we do that Queen's
Speaker 5: Supervisor Release by helping people stay in the communities that
Speaker 5: they live in, so helping them maintain their jobs and
Speaker 5: their housing situations, because when they are detained, they lose
Speaker 5: the ability to be employed or to stay in their home,
Speaker 5: and those things can go away.
Speaker 2: We also spoke to Sasha Tyler Best.
Speaker 6: I'm a clinical supervisor and I've been working with CJ
Speaker 6: for almost four years. I think that we're like It
Speaker 6: kind of reminds me of having a guidance counselor like
Speaker 6: someone who's there to make sure that you meet deadlines
Speaker 6: and to support you and help you sign up for
Speaker 6: the things you want to sign up for.
Speaker 2: They meet with folks in these interview rooms to talk
Speaker 2: about how things are going. They talk about mental health struggles,
Speaker 2: they talk about status of finding new housing. They lend
Speaker 2: people interview clothes if they're going out for a job interview.
Speaker 2: They're giving out snack bags with fruit cups and soup.
Speaker 2: People can get metro cards so they can actually make
Speaker 2: it to their court hearings and to their check ins.
Speaker 2: They provide a whole lot more services than the supervision.
Speaker 3: One client we spoke to said his session felt like
Speaker 3: therapy and it helped him navigate a system that can
Speaker 3: be brutal and hard to understand, and so the program
Speaker 3: helped connect him with the job. Yeah, caseworkers do a
Speaker 3: lot more than just insure someone returns to court, even
Speaker 3: though that's their mandate.
Speaker 1: CJA started the city's first supervised release program in two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine. Today, it serves many more people than
Speaker 1: it did back then. Partly that's because at first the
Speaker 1: program was only for people accused of nonviolent offenses, but
Speaker 1: three years ago, those charged with more serious crimes also
Speaker 1: became eligible. Here's Joanne DeJesus again. She's CJA's executive director.
Speaker 5: So initially in two thousand and nine, we were set
Speaker 5: up as a non violent felony program, so no violent
Speaker 5: offenses were allowed in the program at all. Since January first,
Speaker 5: twenty twenty, all charges are eligible for the program, so
Speaker 5: we get what we never used to see before, things
Speaker 5: like rape charges, murder charges, serious robbery charges, robbery in
Speaker 5: the first degree second degree, which are violent felony offenses.
Speaker 5: We get all of those charges.
Speaker 1: Right about now, you might be thinking releasing people charged
Speaker 1: with nonviolent offenses is one thing, but is it so
Speaker 1: bad for those accused of committing violent crimes to stay
Speaker 1: in custody. The answer is complicated. Not all defendants are
Speaker 1: eligible for the pre trial release program. Judges can deny
Speaker 1: bail to someone they consider to be a threat to
Speaker 1: the community, and they would remain in custody until trial.
Speaker 1: Defendants who are admitted to the program our people a
Speaker 1: judge has decided are a low risk to others. Raises
Speaker 1: another argument that advocates make.
Speaker 3: It's very easy to point a program like this and saying, well,
Speaker 3: they're letting criminals out of jail. That's not true. These
Speaker 3: people have not been convicted. They still have a right
Speaker 3: to their day in court, and this program is meant
Speaker 3: to allow them to wait that period out in the
Speaker 3: community and at home while they go through the system.
Speaker 1: Not surprisingly, though, there's been public and political backlash to
Speaker 1: supervised release.
Speaker 2: Bail reform has become a boogeyman, just like defund the
Speaker 2: police had been a boogeyman. In twenty twenty, after the
Speaker 2: killing of George Floyd, you know, a lot of jurisdictions
Speaker 2: were taking a closer look at their police budgets. Now
Speaker 2: the conversation has expanded a bit to look at the
Speaker 2: entire criminal justice system and questioning the role of bail
Speaker 2: and jail in our society. New York State is a
Speaker 2: good example of a place that's really tackling that question
Speaker 2: head on. Kathy Hokl, a Democrat, is our governor. She's
Speaker 2: been at the forefront of having to make our decisions
Speaker 2: about this issue. Her challenger, Lee Zelden, a Republican, ran
Speaker 2: to the right of her on the last election cycle
Speaker 2: and was running ads that painted bail reform, among other
Speaker 2: police reforms, as this horrible change that would have violent
Speaker 2: criminals running free in the streets.
Speaker 4: For good reasons. Crime on Kathy Hopo's watch is rising,
Speaker 4: and liberal policies like cashless, veiled and not enforcing laws
Speaker 4: are involded in criminals. The solution a new governor. Lee
Speaker 4: Selden's an army veteran and a former prosecutor.
Speaker 2: And Kathy Hochel rolled back bail reforms and made it
Speaker 2: easier for judges to set bail for certain crimes because
Speaker 2: of that political.
Speaker 3: Pressure, and these are potent political messages. When you run
Speaker 3: ads that say that you know they're going to be
Speaker 3: violent criminals in the streets, people really respond to them.
Speaker 3: You see this pressure on organizations and on systems like
Speaker 3: the supervised release program and on organizations like CJA because
Speaker 3: they faced this political pressure on one side, and then
Speaker 3: they have also faced press having to do the actual
Speaker 3: work every day.
Speaker 1: When we come back, a very busy day in the
Speaker 1: life of a Criminal Justice Agency caseworker.
Speaker 5: If you're supposed to meet with your clients, you know
Speaker 5: you have eighty clients when you're supposed to meet with them,
Speaker 5: even you know fifteen to twenty minutes a day, how
Speaker 5: many can you fit in a day?
Speaker 1: New York's Criminal Justice Agency doesn't only see people once
Speaker 1: they've been released awaiting trial. The city also tasks CJA
Speaker 1: with assessing defendants before they're arraigned to give the court
Speaker 1: a better sense of whether a person is a good
Speaker 1: bet for pre trial release. They look at things like
Speaker 1: their housing situation, employment history, and any previous warrants. These
Speaker 1: assessments are important because judges with crowded dockets only have
Speaker 1: a short time to make a decision about each case.
Speaker 3: Before someone gets in front of a judge, they've been
Speaker 3: interviewed by CJA, and CJA does an assessment to gauge
Speaker 3: the likelihood of this person returning to court. Sarah and
Speaker 3: I actually sat in on arramients for hours at the
Speaker 3: Queen's gott In Criminal Court, we saw this process happen
Speaker 3: over and over and over again. These hearings take I
Speaker 3: feel like some people wouldn't believe, but they take five minutes.
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter what the charges are. There five minutes
Speaker 3: they're cycling through folks.
Speaker 1: It's then up to the judge to decide what life
Speaker 1: will look like for the accused before their next court date.
Speaker 1: If the judge opts to enroll the defendant in a
Speaker 1: supervised release program, they need to determine just how much
Speaker 1: supervision that person should get. That's done with a system
Speaker 1: of tiers and levels. The higher the level, the more supervision.
Speaker 1: Joanda Haesu's from CJA explains it like this.
Speaker 5: What it is is it's a combination of factors. It's
Speaker 5: the charge at arrangment, whether or not it's vail eligible
Speaker 5: or not, combined with CJ's release successible and score. That
Speaker 5: is how you land on a tier and a level. However,
Speaker 5: big caveat is the judges get to override that level
Speaker 5: whenever they see a person in front of them in
Speaker 5: that arragement process. If they feel that there's a need
Speaker 5: for additional support, the judges can mandate, and we then
Speaker 5: have to follow whatever the judicial mandate is.
Speaker 1: People at the lowest level of supervision might only have
Speaker 1: to check in with a caseworker once a month. Those
Speaker 1: at the highest level may have to see them every week,
Speaker 1: which can keep caseworkers very busy when.
Speaker 5: Case loads are this high. We have case managers at
Speaker 5: the lower level that have eighty clients. Sometimes we're kicking
Speaker 5: people out of the office at night. Sometimes people are
Speaker 5: frustrated sometimes because it's a lot. And if you think
Speaker 5: about having eighty clients in a seven hour work day
Speaker 5: times five days a week, that's thirty five hours a week.
Speaker 5: And if you're supposed to meet with your clients, you
Speaker 5: know you have eighty clients and you're supposed to meet
Speaker 5: them even you know, fifteen to twenty minutes a day,
Speaker 5: how many can you fit in a day.
Speaker 1: Often these check ins are quick in routine, but sometimes
Speaker 1: the caseworkers have to help people sort out bigger problems
Speaker 1: in their lives. Even with rising caseloads, the CJA caseworkers
Speaker 1: take on as many people as the courts send their way.
Speaker 1: That's because they know what the alternative would look like
Speaker 1: for many of these defendants without supervisor release, they would
Speaker 1: be in jail and likely Rikers Island. Here's Bloomberg Sarah Holder. Again,
Speaker 1: it's rough.
Speaker 2: The caseworkers really care about the work that they're doing,
Speaker 2: and they know that every client they see is a
Speaker 2: client that's not in Rikers and so they believe that
Speaker 2: having more clients is a worthy cause. But it's hard
Speaker 2: to manage all the people and to really give them
Speaker 2: the time that they need to set them up for success.
Speaker 5: I just know that we can't close our doors right,
Speaker 5: not like we say, oh we're full. We can't close outdoors.
Speaker 5: And the more the judges believe in what we can
Speaker 5: do and sort of like linking people up, the more
Speaker 5: they will release people to us.
Speaker 1: When we come back. New York City puts more money
Speaker 1: into the pre trial release program now that CJA and
Speaker 1: the other nonprofits in the city have been doing this
Speaker 1: work for more than a decade. Here's the big question.
Speaker 1: Is this growing pre trial release program working out? Is
Speaker 1: it a success and if so, how do they measure it.
Speaker 2: Case workers at CJA have told us that they can
Speaker 2: really see the progress that specific clients are making. They
Speaker 2: can get a lot out of the program if they
Speaker 2: want to Sasha talked us through an experience with a client.
Speaker 6: One of my clients has been making a lot of progress. Actually,
Speaker 6: he's able to take the resources that we give him
Speaker 6: and sign up for one of the construction programs, which
Speaker 6: is great. And he came in and he was like,
Speaker 6: I don't have time because I'm going to my orientation.
Speaker 6: So that was a good moment, Whereas the time that
Speaker 6: I met him before that he was kind of like,
Speaker 6: I don't.
Speaker 3: Know what I'm going to do.
Speaker 6: I need a new job, and he's like, I don't
Speaker 6: know how do I do this? And so it was
Speaker 6: just like empowering him to take these resources, and I
Speaker 6: love that he's doing it because he's doing it on
Speaker 6: his own with information that we've given him.
Speaker 1: Joanne de Jesus from CJA says her idea of success
Speaker 1: has changed as the program itself has evolved.
Speaker 5: Initially, we used to talk about sort of success, like
Speaker 5: how many people were having their cases disposed in a
Speaker 5: successful way? Right, Like there was a plea down, so
Speaker 5: you came into the program with a felony and you
Speaker 5: pled down to a misdemeanor or a misdemeanor and you
Speaker 5: pled down to a violation. So I would consider that
Speaker 5: a success because you been in the program, the court
Speaker 5: towhare that you're participating, and now your attorney is able
Speaker 5: to negotiate a better plea for you. I think also
Speaker 5: when clients are not rectivating, that's a measure of success.
Speaker 5: I think the number of times we're able to get
Speaker 5: somebody into housing or a job when they came to
Speaker 5: us and they haven't had a job or even benefits right,
Speaker 5: we really try to be a source of information and
Speaker 5: knowledge and get them to where they need to be
Speaker 5: because they have to make their own choices. Ultimately, when
Speaker 5: we're not in the picture anymore, when they're not working
Speaker 5: with us, they have to be able to like figure
Speaker 5: out where to go for information or how to make
Speaker 5: that information work for them. But at some point people
Speaker 5: have to feel empowered to navigate systems. I think that
Speaker 5: goes a long way. I think people are afraid to
Speaker 5: ask for help sometimes, and a lot of them don't
Speaker 5: even have the core support. So being able to tell
Speaker 5: them it's okay to seek out the support you need
Speaker 5: is okay.
Speaker 1: And Bloomberg's Fola Akinnedy points to another way to assess
Speaker 1: how the program is doing. He told us about some
Speaker 1: data that may answer critics who say it's letting dangerous
Speaker 1: people go free.
Speaker 3: So if you take a look at the numbers, most
Speaker 3: people are returning to court, and of those folks, ten
Speaker 3: percent are rearrested while they're out on supervisor release, and
Speaker 3: fewer than two percent of those folks are re arrested
Speaker 3: for violent failing defenses. At the same time, you can
Speaker 3: see that all the actors in the criminal justice system
Speaker 3: seem to trust the program. Prosecutors escort, we see in
Speaker 3: defense attorney's ask forort we see, and judges suggested, and
Speaker 3: so clearly like there's a trust in the program, and
Speaker 3: you could see that play out in the court system.
Speaker 1: With a growing number of people entering the program. The
Speaker 1: city is now going to invest more money in CJA
Speaker 1: so its caseworkers aren't swamped all the time.
Speaker 3: The city is set aside an additional thirty six million
Speaker 3: dollars for the program so that the providers can hire
Speaker 3: more caseworkers and continue to take on clients.
Speaker 2: CJ right now now has seventy five caseworkers. They want
Speaker 2: to hire about thirty more people to deal with the surge.
Speaker 2: One of the times we went to their office, one
Speaker 2: of the case managers lit up thinking that we were
Speaker 2: one of the new people that they had hired, but
Speaker 2: no Cigar. So more help is coming potentially with this
Speaker 2: influx of cash, and the city is also trying to
Speaker 2: put aside some of that money towards more intensive work
Speaker 2: with clients that need more intensive help that have a
Speaker 2: history of recidivism, so adding an emphasis on in person
Speaker 2: meetings with caseworkers that are not as overwhelmed, specifically for
Speaker 2: the smaller group of folks that need the extra support.
Speaker 1: And the program is getting attention even outside of New York.
Speaker 1: Other cities and states are now experimenting with bail reform
Speaker 1: programs of their own.
Speaker 2: Illinois is ending cash bail altogether, and Los Angeles County
Speaker 2: will make almost all misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies ineligible for
Speaker 2: bail on October first. So bail reform writ large, though
Speaker 2: it is a fraught political issue, it's spreading from place
Speaker 2: to place, and on the ground where these reforms are
Speaker 2: taking place, people are looking at programs like New York
Speaker 2: Supervisor Release program as a model for how to actually
Speaker 2: implement those changes in a successful way.
Speaker 1: Where do you think this goes from here? New York
Speaker 1: is investing in the program. Other states are starting to
Speaker 1: adapt similar measures. Do you think that this will take off,
Speaker 1: that paying to get out of jail will become a
Speaker 1: thing of the past at some point.
Speaker 2: We've seen the pendulum swing both ways. We talked about
Speaker 2: the defund the police movement. Some police departments did cut
Speaker 2: their budgets, others left them the same. It's sort of
Speaker 2: the same with bail reform, where some cities and states
Speaker 2: are moving away from bail, others are reversing some of
Speaker 2: those reforms. Even New York has done so. So it's
Speaker 2: a political push and pull. But you can tell that
Speaker 2: in New York, programs like this are not going away
Speaker 2: anytime soon. The city is committing millions more to it
Speaker 2: in the budget, and some of the data and the
Speaker 2: human stories from people from the program might shed some
Speaker 2: light on how it's working on the ground without getting
Speaker 2: into some of the political realities that might become challenges
Speaker 2: down the line.
Speaker 1: Sarah Fola, thanks so much for taking the time to
Speaker 1: share your reporting. Thank you, thanks for having us, thanks
Speaker 1: for listening to us here at the Big Take. It's
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Speaker 1: us questions or comments at Big Take at Bloomberg dot net.
Speaker 1: The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergolina.
Speaker 1: Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Rebecca Shasson is our producer.
Speaker 1: Our associated producer is Sam Gebauer. The editor of this
Speaker 1: episode is Caitlin Kenny. Raphael M. Sely is our engineer.
Speaker 1: Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm Wesksova.
Speaker 1: We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take