Who is Tim Schnacke and why is he pushing bail reform down our throats in New Jersey?

Phil Stilton

Tim Schnacke lives in Colorado, but suddenly has an interest in touting New Jersey’s Bail Reform and Speedy Trial Act as a monumental success.

He has been attacking the media, including yours truly, law enforcement, prosecutors, the bail bond industry and anyone who dares criticize bail reform.

After all, it is his baby.

“Man, I never thought I’d ever use such a stupid term as ‘fake news,’ and my dad knew Nixon,” Schnacke wrote on his blog, followed by just 5 people.  “But recently I’ve seen the bail insurance company posts with all these stories about how horrible everything is in New Jersey, and I noticed that they were all coming from one source – Shore News Network. I mean, it was literally the only outfit saying these things, and the things it was saying were pretty much the opposite of what I was hearing both from people high up and on the ground in New Jersey.”

We decided to look into the man behind the curtain and see why his panties are in such a bunch.  After all, it was his program that just facilitated the release of a two-time child sexual predator back into the neighborhood in Little Egg Harbor.


It turns out Mr. Schnacke is paid good money to promote bail reform.  In fact the company he works for, Pretrial Justice Institute has received over $7 million in federal grant money to write positive reports and analysis on bail reform.  Those are just the grants we were able to find through a quick Google search.


Pretrial Justice Institute hails itself as “The Third Generation of Bail Reform”.

It turns out Schnacke is even one of the architects behind bail reform programs such as New Jersey’s which has put child sex offenders and other repeat offenders back on the streets in the first 30 days.

In fact, in 2013 he was the driving force behind pretrial bail reform in Jefferson Colorado. By 2016, the Attorney General there shut the failing bail reform program down.

Tim Schnacke’s bail reform ideas failed the citizens of Colorado and the Attorney General suspended it in December of last year, a few days before Schnacke’s model was implemented in New Jersey. Now schnacke is pushing bail reform in NJ and going after NJ’s law enforcement community and news outlets such as ours who are reporting the failures. He’s also going after the bail industry because he NEEDS reform to work in NJ so he can get more million dollar grants from the federal government.

Schnacke’s methods were sharply criticized by the American Bail Coalition, a bail industry advocate in 2011, prior to launching his failed bail reform pilot program in Jefferson County, Colorado.

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“Tim Schnake from Jefferson County, CO, wants JEFFCO to become the DC of the Rockies. In his position as a criminal justice planner/analyst for the county, he explained his two part program the first part of which was a jail impact study and the second part of which was to highlight the defects of the commercial bail system in Colorado,” the ABC wrote.

“During the debate over CO SB 186, Schnacke’s findings were challenged by a professor of criminology at the University of Texas, who concluded, that by contemporary academic/scientific standards, Schanke’s methodology suffered from such grave design flaws, that they were fatal to the validity of his findings,” the report continued. “Schnake did not react well and attacked the professor ad hominem through all the deans on his campus, the provost, plus the system chancellor of the University of Texas. Schnake never did address the substance of the professor’s criticism, nor did he mention such a challenge during the symposium presentation (nor did his colleague, Mike Jones, who gave substantially the same presentation at the National Sheriffs Association annual meeting on 18 JUN in a session lumberingly entitled, Increasing Public Safety While Reducing Jail Populations: The Benefit of Cost-Effective Bail Setting and Pre-Trial Services Programs).”

Two years later, Schnacke was able to reform JEFFCO’s justice system.  Three years later, it was shut down.

The mainstream liberal media in New Jersey has for the most part not covered the downside of the new Bail Reform and Speedy Trial Act.

Schnacke and his company are making big bucks on bail reform at the expense of  the residents of New Jersey who now have sexual predators being released back into their neighborhoods.

That’s why Schnacke is interested in pushing bail reform and trash talking the media, law abiding citizens, prosecutors and law enforcement officers who criticize his platform.  His company survives on federal grant money and if the narrative of success is not maintained, they could lose that money in the future.

With the amount of revenue being spent on bail reform, we can only hope at some point this scam against the American people and especially the people of New Jersey is noticed by the Trump Administration and is shut down until a more practical, affordable and sensible reform can be adopted.

Schnacke’s bail reform has failed the citizens of Colorado, where marijuana is legal, but officials are of enough sound mind to have pulled the plug on his terrible bail reform program.

We attempted to contact Mr. Schnacke several times this week to hear his side of the story, but he dodged our repeated calls and never returned any messages.

 

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