Synthetic Control Analysis of the Short-Term Impact of New York State’s Bail Elimination Act on Aggregate Crime

We conduct an empirical evaluation of the short-term impact of New York’s bail reform on crime. New York State’s Bail Elimination Act went into effect on January 1, 2020, eliminating money bail and pretrial detention for nearly all misdemeanor and nonviolent felony defendants. Our analysis of effects on aggregate crime rates after the reform informs the understanding of bail reform and general deterrence, rather than specific deterrence via re-arrest rates of the detained/released population. We conduct a synthetic control analysis for a comparative case study of the impact of bail reform. We focus on synthetic control analysis of post-intervention changes in crime for assault, theft, burglary, robbery, and drug crimes, constructing a dataset from publicly reported crime data of 27 large municipalities. Due to the short time frame before the onset of COVID-19 and its far-reaching effects, we restrict attention to a short post-intervention time period. Nonetheless, evaluation of short-term impacts may still inform hypotheses of general deterrence of bail reform policy. Our findings, including placebo checks and other robustness checks, show that for assault, theft, and drug crimes, there is no significant impact of bail reform on aggregate crime. For robbery, we find a statistically significant increase; for burglary, the synthetic control is more variable and our analysis is deemed less conclusive. Since our study assesses the short-term impacts, further work studying long-term impacts of bail reform and on specific deterrence remains necessary.