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On Monday, President Donald Trump railed against cashless bail on social media, promoting disinformation about bail reform in his complaint.
“Crime in American Cities started to significantly rise when they went to CASHLESS BAIL,” Trump wrote in his missive on Truth Social, adding that the “WORST criminals are flooding our streets” due to bail reform.
“It is a complete disaster, and must be ended, IMMEDIATELY!” Trump concluded.
Trump’s fearmongering on cashless bail comes as his administration appears to be trying to distract the public from its lack of transparency on the Epstein case. Notably, Trump himself has benefited from cashless bail systems, including in the New York criminal case involving his falsification of business records to avoid disclosing hush money payments to an adult film star.
Cashless bail policies recognize that money bail systems do nothing to prevent crime — indeed, such systems benefit wealthier people, as they are “able to post bail and go home, while the average person is often unable to afford money bonds and must remain in jail until the case is resolved,” an analysis from Data for Progress notes.
According to that polling organization, most Americans support ending cash bail. “Twice as many want to see the end of money bail as support it,” the Data for Progress analysis finds.
Several real-world examples and studies also refute Trump’s claims that cashless bail results in higher crime rates. Illinois, for example, began implementing its cashless bail system in the fall of 2023. An examination of crime rates the following year found that there were no significant changes, let alone increases in crime.
“During the first six months of 2023 compared to the first six months of 2024, crime is not up in Illinois,” noted David Olson, co-director of the Center for Criminal Justice at Loyola University. “It’s not up in Chicago. It’s not up in other urban areas. It’s not up in rural areas. It’s not up for violent crime. It’s not up for property crime.”
The Brennan Center for Justice has also examined the issue, publishing the results of its own study in 2024. Looking at crime rates across 33 cities from 2015 to 2021 — two-thirds of which had implemented some type of bail reform — the organization found that those changes didn’t create higher rates of crime.
“We found no statistically significant relationship between bail reforms and trends in crime generally or violent crime specifically. In other words, there is no clear evidence that bail reform had any effect on whether crime rose or fell in the cities we studied,” said Ames Grawert, a senior special counsel at the Brennan Center.
Grawert added:
Critiques of bail reform rest on a misunderstanding of how these policies work. Bail reform does not allow people to evade responsibility for their crimes or walk free despite posing a risk to their communities, as some people believe. These reforms simply seek to end the risk that someone who is legally presumed innocent can be jailed simply because they are too poor to pay money bail.
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