Hundreds of progressive-leaning organizations on Monday urged state lawmakers to avoid broad changes to New York's bail law that would result in jailing more defendants. 

The plea from the groups, including the Fund Excluded Workers Coalition, CUNY Rising Alliance, Housing Justice for All, Sunrise Movement NYC, and the Alliance for Quality Education, comes as lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul are negotiating a state budget that was due to pass last weekend, but remains unsettled. 

Hochul is seeking measures in the budget that would end the so-called "least restrictive" standard for serious criminal charges when judges are considering whether to require cash bail. Hochul has said the measure is meant to clarify the existing law. 

“We are fighting today and every day for a safer, healthier, and more just New York. Everyone deserves to be safe and, particularly in this moment of heightened concern, lawmakers must make deep investments and sweeping policy changes to improve community safety – and not double-down on an a system of injustice that perpetuates poverty, inequity, and despair, which are the conditions to that lead to violence and insecurity," the groups said in a statement. "Collectively, we reject and call for the rejection of any budget deal with bail law changes to increase pre-trial jailing."

Changes to New York's bail law have subsumed the state budget talks in Albany. Lawmakers are expected later in the day to vote for a measure that would temporarily fund state government for at least a week in order to continue the broader negotiations. 

Democratic leaders in the state Senate and Assembly have not backed Hochul's bail law proposal. But in recent days, they have expressed a willingness to compromise on the issue. 

Some Democrats over the weekend announced they would support a measure to allow judges to consider whether a criminal defendant is too dangerous to not be remanded. The judicial discretion proposals in the past have been rejected by supporters of ending cash bail, who have said the measure was necessary to address inequities in the criminal justice system.  

"We are also alarmed by recent reports of a push to rollback New York’s discovery law and call for that to be rejected, as well. We cannot follow Governor Hochul down the path of mass jailing, mass inequality, and mass desperation," the groups said. "We cannot shield our eyes from the humanitarian crisis in our jails and allow our elected representatives to condemn more people there to be traumatized and physically and emotionally scarred for life. That would be a victory for the racist politics of mass incarceration – more people, families, and communities destabilized, more wrongful convictions, more people losing their housing, their jobs, custody of their children, more immigrants being deported."