Tim Ryan Once Called to End Cash Bail Nationwide
A newly resurfaced video of Representative Tim Ryan (D., Ohio) from his his brief presidential run in 2019 shows him saying that he would support eliminating cash bail nationwide.
A video circulating on social media on Wednesday showed Ryan, who is now campaigning for a Senate seat in Ohio, at forum at the University of New Hampshire’s law school. At the 2019 event, the political director for the state ACLU asked him whether he would support ending cash bail nationally.
“Yeah,” responded Ryan. “I think the bail system is inherently unfair, and what it does is it sets people down a spiral of not being able to go to work, not being able to take care of their kids, then you have adverse childhood experiences, and all of a sudden a parent is not at home.”
Tim Ryan wants to eliminate cash bail nationwide. The same policy that’s been a DISASTER in New York!pic.twitter.com/A608hDMcD3
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 12, 2022
“It’s not much different than what we talk about when we see these kids separated from their parents through the immigration situation we’re dealing with in the United States,” Ryan added.
“There’s a great article in the New York Times, I think it was, about adverse childhood experiences,” he said. “Those traumatizing experiences for kids lead to mental health issues, physical health issues, obviously behavioral issues. So I would be for eliminating it.”
Cash bail and crime more broadly have emerged as a top issue for many voters this election. In Ohio specifically, the state’s top court ruled in April that prosecutors could no longer ask a judge to set bail amounts based on potential dangers to public safety.
Cully Stimson, an expert in crime control at the Heritage Foundation, recently told National Review that while proponents of bail reform argue that cash bail is discriminatory and that more lenient procedures would not increase crime, “there is no study out there — none — that has survived peer review that says that crime goes down or remains the same if you eliminate cash bail.”
In Cook County, Ill., circuit court chief judge Tim Evans announced in 2017 that he planned to reduce or eliminate monetary bail for many pretrial defendants. Then, 18 months later, Evans’s office did a study and said that the new policies increased the percentage of defendants who were released pretrial from 72 to 81 percent and that more lenient release procedures did not increase crime.
The news spread across the country as promising evidence in favor of bail reform — but the study was flawed.
A later peer-reviewed study found that that the number of released defendants charged with committing new crimes increased by 45 percent after the new program was implemented, and the number of pretrial releasees charged with committing new violent crimes increased by an estimated 33 percent.
A Chicago Tribune analysis of the study done by Evans’s office “found flaws in both the data underlying Evans’ report and the techniques he used to analyze it — issues that minimize the number of defendants charged with murder and other violent crimes after being released from custody under bail reform.”
“But the damage has been done,” Stimson said. “Because a lot of cities now are still citing this Chicago study as ‘proof’ that not requiring bail won’t increase crime and it’s a good thing basically.”
“The consequences are pretty obvious,” said Stimson, who previously served as a judge, prosecutor, and defense lawyer. “A lot of people who are really dangerous who need to be held pretrial or who need to have a high bail set won’t have either of those happen, and they’ll go out and commit more crimes.”
