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“I APPRECIATE everything that you’ve done,” Judge Jonathan Svetkey told a team of defence lawyers at a recent Night Court arraignment in Manhattan. The lawyers had asked for their client to be released under supervision. They had been working on getting mental-health services and a bed for the night. The judge was sceptical the defendant would accompany them to a shelter. “What if he says, ‘I’m going the other way?’ What are you going to do?” He set bail for $5,000. Judge Svetkey moved on; Night Court usually must handle 70-90 cases a shift.
By day, Manhattan’s Criminal Court is a bustling building. Long queues snake through the metal detectors at the entrance. Lawyers, jurors, defendants and police fill the corridors. But come 5pm, the building clears out, except for two courtrooms, which remain open until 1am to handle arraignments.
Night Court has been around a long time, and without it, New York City’s criminal courts would be even more badly backlogged than they already are. These days, however, late shifts in courts also reflect a national effort to use alternative hours to improve efficiency and engender public trust in the justice system.
To aid rule-breaking drivers who hold down day jobs, many Californian counties offer late hours for traffic court, from 5pm-7.30pm. Forced online by covid, courts around the country continue to hold virtual hearings. Getting to court might be unsafe if someone needs a protection order against a violent partner, so Cook County, which includes Chicago, offers remote proceedings from 9pm until 3am on weekdays, as well as on weekend afternoons. Alternative hours can be used to increase participation, among other benefits, says Danielle Hirsch of the National Centre for State Courts, a non-profit group that promotes court innovations.
Swamped by criminal defendants, New York embraced alternative hours before it was a cause of better-government types. Until 2003, Manhattan’s arraignment court was open 24 hours a day. A third session known as the “lobster shift” ran from 1am until 9am. But during the 1990s, Gotham became one of the safest big cities in America. Fewer arrests meant fewer arraignments. More recently district attorneys have stopped prosecuting marijuana-possession cases, which used to jam up arraignment court. But the remaining shift of Night Court remains busy most nights.
Arrests related to domestic-violence are rising. The influx of migrants has put a strain on the city’s social and judicial services. More migrants are appearing before a criminal-court judge, often for shoplifting necessities such as nappies or stealing something to sell on. A few face charges for more serious crimes such as assault.
New York City law requires, with some exceptions, that defendants appear before a judge within 24 hours of arrest. It would be difficult to meet this goal without Night Court. The arraignment process is no different from during the day. The prosecutor presents the charges and requests that the defendant post bail, be released under supervision or be remanded to jail. Perhaps because it is night, however, some of the emotions seem heightened and many of the defendants can look fragile. Shelter and other services are not as readily available at a late hour, which can be especially worrying on cold winter nights.
Late-night feelings
As in day court, many defendants have mental-health issues and some suffer from drug addiction. Most are poor. Some do not have coats. One former Legal Aid Society lawyer says she had to run out to a 24-hour pharmacy to buy shoes for a client. Taramanie Sukhu, an arraignment supervisor, often shares food.
Ed McCarthy, of Legal Aid, has been working Night Court for more than two decades. He says there is not always a social worker available in the evening or on weekends. (Court is in session seven days and nights each week in New York City.) Defendants can languish at Rikers Island, the city’s largest and most notorious jail, Mr McCarthy says, “only because there’s nobody to offer a programme or a way of giving judges reasons to release you.”
Aubrey Fox of New York City Criminal Justice Agency, a charity supporting pre-trial defendants, says that an infrastructure to promote release instead of detention does function quietly in the background. For every person held at Rikers, nine are released into the community. Many are candidates for treatment and other social services. About 85% make all their court dates. “That gives judges more confidence that if they release someone they will be taken care of,” Mr Fox says.
Night Court is one place where this triage begins. The public gallery tends to be quiet, except for the occasional family member. One family drove from Michigan when a close relative was arrested. The late-shift courtrooms also attract tourists. Kathrin Kolvenbach, a trainee lawyer from Germany, said she had heard about it from a guidebook. She was there to learn about America’s court system. Others are there to gawk, looking for gritty entertainment. Tourists give Night Court tips to each other on Tripadvisor, a travel website. One defence lawyer said seeing tourists, who tend to be white Europeans, leaves a bad taste in her mouth and unsettles her clients, who are mostly African-American or Hispanic.
Krystal Rodriguez, policy head of the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College, says arraignments both night and day are a “snapshot of how the criminal-justice system becomes the unfortunate repository for all these other social issues that outside of the criminal legal system we haven’t been able to address”. Many Americans learned about Night Court from an eponymous sitcom that ran from 1984 until 1992. It was recently rebooted and is not very funny. There are few laughs in the real one either. ■
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Wall Street is warning that the U.S. Department of Education’s crack down on student loan repayments may take billions of dollars out of consumers’ pockets and hit low income Americans particularly hard.
The department has restarted collections on defaulted student loans under President Donald Trump this month. For first time in around five years, borrowers who haven’t kept up with their bills could see their wages taken or face other punishments.
Using a range of interest rates and lengths of repayment plans, JPMorgan estimated that disposable personal income could be collectively cut by between $3.1 billion and $8.5 billion every month due to collections, according to Murat Tasci, senior U.S. economist at the bank and a Cleveland Federal Reserve alum.
If that all surfaced in one quarter, collections on defaulted and seriously delinquent loans alone would slash between 0.7% and 1.8% from disposable personal income year-over-year, he said.
This policy change may strain consumers who are already stressed out by Trump’s tariff plan and high prices from years of runaway inflation. These factors can help explain why closely followed consumer sentiment data compiled by the University of Michigan has been hitting some of its lowest levels in its seven-decade history in the past two months.
“You have a number of these pressure points rising,” said Jeffrey Roach, chief economist at LPL Financial. “Perhaps in aggregate, it’s enough to quash some of these spending numbers.”
Bank of America said this push to collect could particularly weigh on groups that are on more precarious financial footing. “We believe resumption of student loan payments will have knock-on effects on broader consumer finances, most especially for the subprime consumer segment,” Bank of America analyst Mihir Bhatia wrote to clients.
Economic impact
Student loans account for just 9% of all outstanding consumer debt, according to Bank of America. But when excluding mortgages, that share shoots up to 30%.
Total outstanding student loan debt sat at $1.6 trillion at the end of March, an increase of half a trillion dollars in the last decade.
The New York Fed estimates that nearly one of every four borrowers required to make payments are currently behind. When the federal government began reporting loans as delinquent in the first quarter of this year, the share of debt holders in this boat jumped up to 8% from around 0.5% in the prior three-month period.
To be sure, delinquency is not the same thing as default. Delinquency refers to any loan with a past-due payment, while defaulting is more specific and tied to not making a delayed payment with a period of time set by the provider. The latter is considered more serious and carries consequences such as wage garnishment. If seriously delinquent borrowers also defaulted, JPMorgan projected that almost 25% of all student loans would be in the latter category.
JPMorgan’s Tasci pointed out that not all borrowers have wages or Social Security earnings to take, which can mitigate the firm’s total estimates. Some borrowers may resume payments with collections beginning, though Tasci noted that would likely also eat into discretionary spending.
Trump’s promise to reduce taxes on overtime and tips, if successful, could also help erase some effects of wage garnishment on poorer Americans.
Still, the expected hit to discretionary income is worrisome as Wall Street wonders if the economy can skirt a recession. Much hope has been placed on the ability of consumers to keep spending even if higher tariffs push product prices higher or if the labor market weakens.
LPL’s Roach sees this as less of an issue. He said the postpandemic economy has largely been propped up by high-income earners, who have done the bulk of the spending. This means the tide-change for student loan holders may not hurt the macroeconomic picture too much, he said.
“It’s hard to say if there’s a consensus view on this yet,” Roach said. “But I would say the student loan story is not as important as perhaps some of the other stories, just because those who hold student loans are not necessarily the drivers of the overall economy.”
A woman walks in an aisle of a Walmart supermarket in Houston, Texas, on May 15, 2025.
Ronaldo Schemidt | Afp | Getty Images
U.S. consumers are becoming increasingly worried that tariffs will lead to higher inflation, according to a University of Michigan survey released Friday.
The index of consumer sentiment dropped to 50.8, down from 52.2 in April, in the preliminary reading for May. That is the second-lowest reading on record, behind June 2022.
The outlook for price changes also moved in the wrong direction. Year-ahead inflation expectations rose to 7.3% from 6.5% last month, while long-term inflation expectations ticked up to 4.6% from 4.4%.
However, the majority of the survey was completed before the U.S. and China announced a 90-day pause on most tariffs between the two countries. The trade situation appears to be a key factor weighing on consumer sentiment.
“Tariffs were spontaneously mentioned by nearly three-quarters of consumers, up from almost 60% in April; uncertainty over trade policy continues to dominate consumers’ thinking about the economy,” Surveys of Consumers director Joanne Hsu said in the release.
Inflation expectations are closely watched by investors and policymakers. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has said the central bank wants to make sure long-term inflation expectations do not rise because of tariffs before resuming rate cuts.
A final consumer sentiment index for the month is slated to be released on May 30, and will likely be closely watched to see if the tariff pause led to an improvement in sentiment.
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Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., speaks during the 2025 National Retirement Summit in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, March 12, 2025.
Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Wall Street titan Jamie Dimon said Thursday that a recession is still a serious possibility for the United States, even after the recent rollback of tariffs on China.
“If there’s a recession, I don’t know how big it will be or how long it will last. Hopefully we’ll avoid it, but I wouldn’t take it off the table at this point,” the JPMorgan Chase CEO said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
Specifically, Dimon said he would defer to his bank’s economists, who put recession odds at close to a toss-up. Michael Feroli, the firm’s chief U.S. economist, said in a note to clients on Tuesday that the recession outlook is “still elevated, but now below 50%.”
Dimon’s comments come less than a week after the U.S. and China announced that they were sharply reducing tariffs on one another for 90 days. The U.S. has also implemented a 90-day pause for many tariffs on other nations.
Thursday’s comments mark a change for Dimon, who said last month before the China truce that a recession was likely.
He also said there is still “uncertainty” on the tariff front but the pauses are a positive for the economy and market.
“I think the right thing to do is to back off some of that stuff and engage in conversation,” Dimon said.
However, even with the tariff pauses, the import taxes on goods entering the United States are now sharply higher than they were last year and could cause economic damage, according to Dimon.
“Even at this level, you see people holding back on investment and thinking through what they want to do,” Dimon said.
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