New Jersey was hailed as a model for criminal justice reform nationally when state lawmakers eliminated cash bail more than a decade ago.
Supporters of the move cheered that poor defendants would no longer be jailed before their trial just because they couldn't pay, and public officials celebrated the savings from a plummeting jail population.
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But the two front-runners in the race to replace Gov. Phil Murphy (D) both want to change the risk-based system of pretrial incarceration that replaced cash bail.
Democrat Mikie Sherrill says she supports the current system conceptually but has concerns about defendants not showing up for court and those accused of violent crimes not being detained before trial. Republican Jack Ciattarelli blames bail reform for repeat offenders, saying he would appoint conservative judges and prosecutors and fix "loopholes" to ensure more defendants are jailed pretrial.
Neither candidate offered data to back up their concerns or specific plans for change. Supporters of cashless bail say that's because the system works.
Former Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who signed the 2014 bail reform law, said arguments against cashless bail often are rooted in "ignorance." Christie spoke at a forum on Friday in Princeton on how policymakers and advocates could use bail reform as a model for sentencing reform.
"This is not some unusual, lenient way of dealing with people who have been charged with crimes. In fact, it's been done in the federal system in every federal district, all 93 of them across the country, for a very long time," said Christie, a former U.S. attorney for New Jersey.
How it works
Under the cash-based bail system that predated the 2014 law, New Jersey judges set a monetary amount defendants had to pay in order to go free before their trial.
That left poor defendants who were unable to afford bail languishing sometimes months or even longer behind bars awaiting trial, while dangerous defendants could get out of jail as long as they paid, Christie noted. Such an inequitable system did little to protect public safety, he added.
"Drug dealers, violent drug dealers, and gangbangers were regularly being able to be released from prison. Why? Because you can't set the bail high enough," Christie said. "They got the cash because of their criminal activity."
The 2014 bail-reform law took effect in January 2017. It requires prosecutors who consider a defendant a flight risk or a danger to the community to ask a judge to order pretrial incarceration, and the judge must consider nine risk-based factors in deciding whether to hold them. Those factors include their age at arrest, the violence of their offense, prior convictions and sentences of incarceration, and prior failures to appear in court. The courts also created an online system to allow judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and corrections officials to share information about a defendant, case status, and more, said Glenn Grant, the recently retired judge who served as the longtime administrative director of New Jersey's courts.
Since the state embraced cashless bail, more low-level offenders await trial at home while more serious offenders get incarcerated pretrial, according to a 2023 report to the Legislature.
In 2012, more than 1,500 people were in custody because they couldn't pay bail of $2,500 or less – representing nearly 12% of people in county jails – while less than half of county jails' population were people charged with violent crimes, sex crimes, or weapons offenses, according to the report.
Now, most people in county jails are there for more serious first- and second-degree crimes, Grant said.
He called bail reform's success "remarkable."
"The state's county jail population has been reduced by almost 40%. Eighty percent of the defendants are released within 48 hours, and a majority of that 80% are released within 24 hours," Grant said at the Princeton forum.
Limiting pretrial incarceration to the most dangerous and elusive defendants also better protects defendants who don't pose such risks from the harmful impacts of lengthy incarceration, such as job loss, housing loss, educational impacts, and family disruption, he added.
Caveats and loopholes
So what exactly are Ciattarelli and Sherrill saying about the system?
Sherrill, a four-term congresswoman who worked at the New Jersey U.S. Attorney's Office from 2012 to 2016, said she believes in the current system "with caveats" to better ensure that people don't blow off scheduled court dates and violent offenders get held.
"We need to look at ways to make sure that, either, if they're a danger that they're held, or if they're a flight risk that we have ways of getting them back to return. Often that's (an electronic) bracelet or something like that," she told the New Jersey Monitor.
Sherrill's comments echoed what she told members of the New Jersey State Policemen's Benevolent Association in August.
"What I see in too many cases with criminal justice reform is you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You're saying, I don't like this process, so I'm going to get rid of this process, but I'm not putting anything in its place to keep us safe and to keep people accountable," she said then.
Ciattarelli, a former state assemblyman and retired medical publisher whose running mate is Morris County Sheriff Jim Gannon, promised broader changes.
"We will fix bail reform loopholes that currently allow violent and repeat offenders to walk free by appointing conservative state judges and county prosecutors as well as revising the current bail reform law to toughen rules governing juvenile offenders," Ciattarelli told the New Jersey Monitor.
Ciattarelli added that local police confirm that "arrest, release, repeat is real."
"It's also demoralizing for law enforcement professionals to have to arrest the same person time and time again. Cashless bail has created a professional criminal who's learned how to game the system," he said.
Gannon echoed that complaint, saying police can attest that bail has "turned some of our correctional facilities into revolving doors."
What the data says
Grant, the former courts administrator, cites data showing there has been no increase in court no-shows, and that recidivism rates of those released "are equal to or better than" the rates before bail reform.
Almost all defendants released before trial do not reoffend, with the rate of rearrest for very serious crimes like violent felonies at less than 1% annually since 2018, according to the 2023 legislative report.
Defendants released before their trial also appear for court more consistently, with the court appearance rate at 93% in 2014 compared to 97% in 2020, the report notes.
Such statistics are why New Jersey's cashless bail system is considered "the gold standard" nationally, Grant said.
Attorney Alexander Shalom, who was active in efforts to end New Jersey's cash-bail system, conceded an 11-year-old law could be ripe for review to ensure it's working. He pointed to the length of pretrial incarceration and the need to make sure defendants get their constitutional right to a speedy trial.
But he called the concerns now being aired on the campaign trail "more propaganda than reality."
"We have to make sure that we're making changes, when we do, based on data and reality rather than perception and fear," said Shalom, who now heads the Lowenstein Center for Public Interest. "What we shouldn't do is take a stray story or someone's fear or speculation and let that drive changes to a statute that has been wildly successful at both protecting our communities and ensuring that people show up in court."
Multiple studies have shown that bail reform has not worsened crime rates.
Reducing pretrial detention did not impact domestic violence fatalities or gun violence in New Jersey, two separate studies last year and earlier this year found. Penn State researchers found in 2019 that both New Jersey's crime rate and pretrial jail population fell after lawmakers ended cash bail, while the Brennan Center for Justice found no link between bail reform and crime rates in a 2024 study of 33 cities that enacted cashless bail systems.
"Sometimes when a crime happens or we have a thing where there's a rash of car thefts, people are quick to blame bail reform. But that's not the case," New Jersey Public Defender Jennifer Sellitti said.
Federal attacks
Doubts persist. Observers say that is probably because of federal attacks on cashless bail.
President Donald Trump in August signed an executive order threatening federal funding cuts to cities and states with cashless bail systems, which "allow dangerous individuals to immediately return to the streets and further endanger law-abiding, hard-working Americans because they know our laws will not be enforced," a White House statement said.
Many Republican lawmakers consequently moved to limit pretrial release.
Christie, a Trump foe, said bail reform has been "mischaracterized by my party" as liberal and permissive and noted Ciattarelli, who Trump endorsed, "will listen to some of the yelling voices in my own party about this."
He predicted that whoever wins the governor's race might not change New Jersey's bail system, despite what they say on the campaign trail. But advocates and policymakers who believe in the success of New Jersey's bail reform should fight to preserve it, he added.
"Justice which is dispensed with care, with reason, and with compassion is the best justice and should be the justice we should be striving for all the time," he said.
Sophie Nieto-Muñoz contributed.
New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com.