Maryland Ended Cash Bail. The Results Speak for Themselves.

For years, bail reform advocates argued that eliminating cash bail would reduce incarceration, improve fairness, and enhance public safety. Maryland was held out as a model — a state willing to take the leap and prove the theory worked in practice. Eight years later, the outcome is clear, and it is not the one reformers promised.

In practice, it produced more detention, fewer options, and less accountability — all while being sold as progress.

Rather than reducing pretrial incarceration, Maryland increased it. Judges, stripped of traditional bail tools that allowed for conditional release, increasingly defaulted to detention. When the choice narrows to release without accountability or detention, detention becomes the path of least resistance. The result was more defendants sitting in jail before trial, not fewer — just without the visibility or accountability that once existed under the cash bail system.

At the same time, arrests declined across the state. Reform advocates often cite this as evidence of progress, but the broader picture tells a different story. Crime rose, even as enforcement weakened, and fewer arrests did not translate into fewer people jailed pretrial. Instead, Maryland experienced a quiet shift: detention expanded while oversight diminished. This was not decarceration. It was displacement.

What bail reform actually removed was not money, but accountability. Surety bail provided courts with a compliance partner — someone outside the government with a direct stake in ensuring court appearance, monitoring defendants, and responding quickly to failures. When that system was eliminated, the burden shifted entirely to the state. Courts lost flexibility, law enforcement absorbed more failure-to-appear work, and taxpayers funded longer and more frequent pretrial detention. The system became simpler, but it also became less effective.

Maryland matters because it was not an outlier or a half-measure. It was a full-scale experiment that reformers pointed to as a national blueprint. If cash bail reform worked as advertised, Maryland should be the success story. Instead, it reveals an uncomfortable truth: removing money from the system does not automatically produce fairness, safety, or better outcomes. In practice, it produced more detention, fewer options, and less accountability — all while being sold as progress.

If ending cash bail leads to more people jailed before trial, rising crime, and a system with fewer tools to manage risk, then the question isn’t whether Maryland failed the experiment. The question is why anyone is still pretending it worked.