The Legal Aid Society sounded the alarm over the surging number of New Yorkers held in jail pending trial across the state in recent months, as reported by the Times Union.

Criminal justice advocates say the increase can be attributed to recent changes made to 2019’s bail reform laws that took effect in July, in an effort by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to roll back elements of the law. The changes were hastily made amid the state’s budget process in April in response to mounting criticism from law enforcement officials and district attorneys – whose use of fear-mongering to conjure up dangers the reform supposedly posed to the public – impacted support for the law.

Marie Ndiaye, Supervising Attorney of the Decarceration Project at The Legal Aid Society, said the repeated rhetoric that more people in jail makes a community safer has further influenced judicial decisions and perpetuated opponents’ arguments that are not based in logic.

“We have shown over and over again that we can have a low jail population and keep New Yorkers safe,” she said. “The fact that we would go back to the old ways of pretrial detention and incarceration mostly because of political fear-mongering and the police trying to avoid accountability is unfortunate. It’s something that we should be guarding against at all costs.”