The office of Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York on Wednesday unveiled a $17.8 million plan to reduce reliance on the bail system by expanding a program that keeps nonviolent and low-level offenders out of jail while they await trial. The program would more than triple the number of defendants in pretrial supervision, rather than have them languish at the city’s main jail at Rikers Island. An impetus for the change, city officials said, was the recent suicide of Kalief Browder, who was held at Rikers for three years and released at age 19, when prosecutors dropped charges.
