Researchers on Vera’s Greater Justice New York team have been studying the impact of New York State bail reform laws on jail populations and courtroom practices since the law’s implementation in 2020. Vera’s jail brief series presents analysis of statewide incarceration trends from April 2019 to June 2021 and shows that fewer people are incarcerated in jails across New York after the passage of bail reform. However, individual counties’ experiences of bail reform may have varied, as local incarceration systems differ in many aspects—including the share of the pretrial detention population in jail, county demographic composition, level of urbanicity, and law enforcement culture. A closer look at localized trends in jail incarceration can help stakeholders contextualize the effects of bail reform in each county.

The county-level factsheets provide details of local jail incarceration trends in 40 counties outside of New York City between April 2019 and June 2022. The factsheets provide county-specific incarceration trends by charge severity, racial disparities in incarceration, lengths of stays, and bail amounts—datapoints that are important for local criminal legal policy and advocacy discussions. Please read the methodology document for a comprehensive explanation of Vera’s data collection and analysis.