On bail policy, Massachusetts must catch up
November 23, 2025
Massachusetts has positioned itself as a leader on a range of policy domains under attack by the Trump administration. But as a national conversation has arisen about cash bail and public safety, fueled by misinformation from the White House, Massachusetts is on the sidelines.
At the same time, Massachusetts has been undergoing its own experiment with releasing people who would otherwise be detained pretrial this summer—people who were denied their right to counsel while bar advocates declined taking new appointed cases, holding out for a pay raise to continue serving as public defenders.
In light of these developments, now is a critical time to pursue evidence-based policy that fosters both community safety and racial justice. Massachusetts can take up that mantel with holistic pretrial reform to reduce the use of cash bail and pretrial detention.
For people who are legally presumed innocent, cash bail produces wealth-based detention and a two-tiered system of justice: freedom for those with financial means, and detention in conditions indistinguishable from punishment for those without.
The vast majority of people prosecuted for crimes in the Commonwealth are indigent. Therefore, for many accused people, posting any amount of bail can be nearly impossible. Given the socioeconomic and racial wealth disparities throughout Massachusetts, the Commonwealth’s current system of release and detention disparately burdens people of color. This affects entire families, who scrape together funds to buy their loved ones’ freedom. And any system which releases someone based on their access to wealth, rather than their true threat, enables precisely the severe harms to individual and community safety we all want to prevent.
Eight years have passed since the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court first required judges to consider the financial circumstances of people accused of crimes when deciding whether to impose cash bail as a condition of release. One year later, the Legislature adopted omnibus criminal justice reform legislation that sought to reduce stark racial disparities in incarceration, reduce the criminal system’s overall footprint, and study continued bail reform.
While that set of reforms resulted in some important gains in justice and community safety, the benefits of the limited pretrial reforms were not distributed equally. New research from the Roundtable on Racial Disparities in Massachusetts Criminal Courts, a project of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management of the Harvard Kennedy School Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, provides suggestive evidence that white people have been the biggest, and nearly only, beneficiaries of the limited pretrial reforms adopted since 2017. As the jail population fell statewide, that decrease was almost entirely among white defendants.
Published by MassINC