Social
Evaluating Firearm Violence After New Jersey’s Cash Bail Reform Jaquelyn Jahn* Jaquelyn Jahn Jessica T. Simes Jonathan
Background: Reducing pretrial detention (i.e. people incarcerated in jails) has been a cornerstone of movements to end mass incarceration. Across many U.S. cities, there are ongoing public debates on policies that would end pretrial detention due to the inability to afford bail, including oppositional concerns that doing so would increase community violence.
Objective: To evaluate changes in firearm violence after New Jersey’s 2017 bail reform policy.
Methods: We used augmented synthetic control models to examine changes in firearm mortality and combined fatal and non-fatal shootings in New Jersey (2014-2019). We focused on New Jersey because it was one of the first states to implement cash bail reform. We compared quarterly rates of fatal and nonfatal firearm assault injuries and firearm self-harm injuries per 100,000 people in New Jersey to a weighted combination of states that did not implement any kind of reform to pretrial detention during the study period. Models matched on a variety of auxiliary covariates, and CIs calculated using the conformal inference method.
Results: New Jersey’s pretrial detention population dramatically decreased under bail reform. We did not find evidence of increases in firearm mortality or gun violence, overall or within Black and White racialized groups during the post-policy period, despite rising rates of gun violence nationally during these years. The cumulative ATT for firearm mortality was -0.13 (95% CI: -0.53, 0.23).
Conclusions and relevance: Incarceration and gun violence are significant public health problems impacting racially and economically marginalized groups. Cash bail reform may be an important tool for reducing pretrial detention and advancing health equity without exacerbating community violence.