Empire State of Incarceration

The median bail amount preventing people’s release varied as Rochester and New York City, widely—from $1,000 on a misdemeanor in New York City to $5,000 nonprofits ran these monitoring for the same charge in Buffalo.7 Regardless of the bail amount, programs meant to ensure that people returned to court.9 In smaller the result was that thousands of people, predominantly people of and more rural cou. [...] On March 18, Rikers Island, New York City’s most notorious jail, confirmed its first case of COVID-19.16 By the end of the month, 137 staff members and 167 people incarcer- ated in New York jails, including Rikers, had tested positive.17 At that point, the infection rate on Rikers Island was seven times higher than in the rest of the city.18 14 | Vera Institute of Justice In the face of the pandem. [...] Offi- pandemic changed the makeup of New York’s cials took the biggest steps to reduce jails jail populations in New York City, where infection rates were the high- People jailed during the first wave of the pandemic tended to be est both inside the jails and in the community. [...] At the end of March 2020, for example, New York City announced plans to release hundreds of people, which they did over the next several months, to try to slow the outbreak at Rikers.23 In New York City, although the number of people held pretrial fell by more than 10 percent from February to June, because the num- ber of people serving jail sentences plummeted so much, in June, nearly nine out of. [...] 19 | Empire State of Incarceration “ In New York City, the average length of stay increased from 102 days in June 2019 to 172 days in June 2020; outside of New York City, the average length of stay increased from 52 days in June 2019 to 113 days in June 2020.