On Wednesday, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) quietly dropped a bombshell. For months, the state has avoided releasing much-needed data on individuals who were arraigned in New York before lawmakers passed bail reform. But newly available data confirm what critics have long argued: bail reform was followed by a significant increase in criminal reoffending. …

Pre-trial detention in New York State is not supposed to be conditioned on whether a person is likely to reoffend. Both before and after bail reform, judges must release offenders on “the least restrictive alternative and condition or conditions that will reasonably assure the principal’s return to court”—that is, minimize his risk of failure to appear. Manhattan Institute scholars have emphasized time and again that New York State is unique in prohibiting judges from giving any consideration to public safety risk in remand decisions. But even given that reality, a shift toward less-restrictive pretrial detention conditions on average seems to have driven up the risk of rearrest following release.

Perhaps the increase in crime identified above will be offset by a reduction in future offending, given the long-run criminogenic effects of jail. On the other hand, the most relevant study to New York finds that the incapacitating effect of jail pretrial slightly outweighs its criminogenic effect post-release, at least within the study period. In any case, those effects are heterogenous. Some detainees are career criminals, for whom the benefits of keeping them behind bars almost certainly outweigh criminogenic costs; others are not.

One thing is clear: bail reform did not make it easier for judges to distinguish between criminals. Instead, it shifted the balance of detention against public safety—and, as John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Michael Rempel noted during a public discussion of the data on Wednesday, it did so without closing the much-discussed racial gap in detention that it was largely intended to do.