In November 2019, New York City announced an expansion of Supervised Release, which lets defendants await the outcome of their cases outside jail with check-ins and offers of services.
Former probation commissioner Vincent Schiraldi claimed that “community support” had proved New York could have “fewer people incarcerated and more safety.”
The expansion served several purposes and constituencies at once. City officials needed fewer people in jail to carry out their Rikers closure plan. Legal Aid wanted more defendants released and connected to services. Providers would supervise a much larger clientele: the announcement anticipated three to four times as many participants and annual funding rising from $37 million to $116 million.
The promise of greater safety made this an offer to the rest of the city, too.
A 2020 evaluation by MDRC found a concrete benefit for defendants: about eight fewer days in jail per enrollee. Researchers compared defendants around an eligibility cutoff to estimate what the program changed. Its public summary also said Supervised Release “did not increase arrests for new crimes.”
The full report estimated nine-month rearrest for any offense at 66.5% with the program against 71.6% without it; violent-felony rearrest was 9.0% against 6.1%. Neither difference was statistically significant. The study also excluded the violent-felony and domestic-violence cases the expansion was admitting.
By 2024, Aubrey Fox, head of the Criminal Justice Agency, one of the program’s providers, was crediting Supervised Release with helping meet the jail-population targets needed to close Rikers. Whether the expanded program made other New Yorkers safer remained a question he wanted researchers to answer.