Finding Common Ground: Cross-sector solutions to modernize Ontario’s bail system provides practical, targeted solutions to reform the bail system shaped by key actors including police services, lawyers and service providers. Through informed, collaborative dialogue, this report outlines opportunities to reduce pressures on the police, courts and correctional systems in Ontario by strengthening the pathways to care and support for individuals impacted by poverty, mental health challenges, and addictions, allowing the system to focus its finite resources on serious cases as it was designed to do, while at the same time enhancing public safety.

Unequal Justice: Experiences and outcomes of young people in Ontario’s youth bail system report and interactive website outline the findings from a unique research project conducted by the John Howard Society of Ontario on the front end of our youth justice system. The findings come from an analysis of a decade’s worth of court and pre-trial detention admissions data and extensive consultations with stakeholders and young people with lived experience, and indicate that troubling trends persist in the youth bail system particularly for vulnerable and BIPOC youth. The report also present opportunities to strengthen the youth bail system and alternatives to incarceration to keep young people out of jail.

Reasonable Bail? highlights how current bail practices challenge both the legally enshrined presumptions of innocence and reasonable bail. JHS Ontario Researchers analyzed bail conditions assigned to a sample of Ontarians released on bail, which revealed troubling patterns of overuse of bail conditions. The report provides a number of recommendations on how to improve bail processes in Ontario, both in terms of efficiency and respect for due process rights.