The state yesterday announced
the distribution of over $8 million gained from lower incarceration bills
courtesy of changes to divert more convicts from prison and shortening
imprisonment sentences. Fortunately, the Gov. John Bel Edwards Administration
appeared to resist the temptation to spread
the money out for political reasons, resulting in local funds going only to
entities in the five largest parishes in population terms (which also have the
highest numbers of offenders).
All told, Orleans Parish operations received close
to $3 million. But perhaps that should have gone higher, because of the turn
pretrial procedures have taken over the past year-and-a-half.
In early 2017, the city passed an ordinance eliminating up-front bail for many minor offenses (and limiting it to $2,500 for any city offense), in effect extending an effort begun several years earlier to use pretrial services to forgo bail for others. With the remaining such offenses, the parish Criminal District Court followed by having one commissioner not set bail for offenses permitting that, and low amounts for others required by state law. Others followed later in the year.
Meanwhile, a group not required by law to release
its details began
collecting money to fund bail. Called the New Orleans Safety and Freedom
Fund, it would select from the jailed accused those it wanted to spring using
donations. A few leaders would then pay cash collected, avoiding state regulation
regarding surety bonding that otherwise would have raised their costs dramatically.
One leader, Joshua Cox, now acts as a senior adviser to Mayor LaToya Cantrell.
Still, the court’s officials in charge of bail-setting
– headed by Magistrate Harry Cantrell, the mayor’s father-in-law – continued to
set high amounts for more serious crimes. This included state misdemeanors,
which he
had picked up in 2016 as a result of City Council cuts (his daughter-in-law
having participated in that) to state District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s
office. Because of the heavy workload, the magistrate often decided bails
quickly and on the high side.
But that came to an end a couple of months ago,
when a federal district judge ruled
how Cantrell performed his job risked a conflict of interest. Because state law awards part
of its $15 criminal bond fee to the district criminal courts, the ruling said Cantrell
and his commissioners had to find “clear and convincing” evidence of pretrial
detention necessity before requiring a bond.
Cantrell originally responded to the suit by
saying he would stop automatically imposing high bond amounts and spend more time
considering individual cases, but the decision essentially forced his hand. So,
he joined his commissioners in going to the other extreme on bond amounts,
dramatically lowering these in many cases so time constraints wouldn’t matter,
even for major crimes.
This played into the hands of the charity bail
organization. With much lower costs, it could afford to free more of the accused
and increasing the likelihood that those facing major charges would get out. In
essence, this series of events has moved New Orleans fairly close to becoming,
for all intents and purposes, a bail-free jurisdiction.
Which poses a problem. In the past few years,
instituting of this policy has broken out from the margins into wider circulation,
but data
are scarce to judge whether its failure-to-appear rates aren’t higher. Yet even
the small New Orleans 2017 sample
flashed some warning lights: it claimed similar FTA rates between participants
in the reduced/no bail cohort and those not who had no release conditions, but
admitted higher rates for re-arrest and FTA for those with conditions in the
experimental group. The new environment where even higher bail amounts
essentially turn this cohort into another release-on-recognizance subset will
drive those rates higher.
Unfortunately, Mayor Cantrell seems committed to
staying this course. An opinion
piece she co-authored with City Council Pres. Jason Williams reiterates a strategy
to eliminate bail as much as possible. If so, look for New Orleans to move up
that list of dangerous cities that might require many more state dollars to
stem.
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