ALBANY — Gov. Hochul’s plan to shoehorn bail changes into the state budget is not going over well with top lawmakers.
Legislative leaders said Wednesday that there is little desire and limited time to negotiate the governor’s leaked public safety plan ahead of New York’s April 1 fiscal deadline.
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx), a staunch defender of the state’s current cashless bail system, warned that many lawmakers in his conference are wary of the tight timeframe and the politics surrounding the issue.
“I know our opponents are going to say, ‘You know, they’re being soft on crime. They don’t care about victims.’ That’s all bulls–t,” Heastie said. “We care about having safe communities, and I hate when people try to politicize these things.”
Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers) admitted she was initially caught off guard by Hochul’s 10-point plan, leaked to the press last week, saying it took her “by surprise.”
While Senate Democrats are open to discussing some of Hochul’s plan, addressing “all 10 points would be hard” to work out before the budget is due next week, Stewart-Cousins added.
She argued that lawyers spent years crafting the 2019 reforms that essentially did away with cash bail in New York. Those overhauls, meant to address racial and economic disparities in the justice system, were tweaked a year later but have still faced criticism from Republicans and police unions.
“There were a lot of discussions before we did the original reforms,” Stewart-Cousins said. “And again, we’re always happy to look again, but we’re not going back to a place that we weren’t at before we even began the discussion on bail.”
Critics, including Mayor Adams, have continuously drawn a link between bail reform and rising crime in New York but the data doesn’t back that up.
A frustrated Heastie argued that the issue is more complex, noting that crime has increased nationwide during the COVID pandemic and that access to social services was disrupted over the past two years.
“Members want to have the discussion and not feel rushed,” he said, noting that there is some agreement on increasing funding for mental health services.
The rest of Hochul’s plan includes measures making more crimes bail-eligible and granting judges more discretion in deciding if a person should be detained pretrial.
The plan would also affect the state’s Raise the Age laws by allowing judges to keep a minor’s case in Criminal Court if gun possession is involved.
In an op-ed published in the Daily News, Hochul and Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin defended the proposals after avoiding reporters and refusing to discuss details for days.
The pair admit that data don’t support the idea that current bail reform laws are responsible for increased crime rates, but said they still want to give judges broader authority to set bail for repeat offenders and in all felony cases involving illegal guns.
Meanwhile, criminal justice advocates assailed the proposal as a step backward and accused Hochul of caving to political pressure as she gears up for the Democratic primary in June.
“Hochul’s plan to lock up more people in jail is not addressing public safety — it’s punting on public safety,” said Nick Encalada-Malinowski, the civil rights campaigns director with VOCAL-NY. “It’s saying, ‘We don’t want to actually do the work to address these issues, so we are just going to throw some people in jail and say we did something.'”
Rodney Holcombe, FWD.us New York State director of criminal justice reform, said the rollback measures “would unjustly expose tens of thousands more legally innocent New Yorkers to bail and pretrial jailing.”
“This proposal is not a ‘scalpel-like approach,’ but a proposal that would have a significant impact on the very poor, Black, and Brown communities that the original bail reform package was supposed to protect,” he added.
