By Johanna Lacoe, Brett Fischer & Steven Raphael 

Objectives

Low-income individuals facing criminal charges experience disproportionately high rates of pretrial detention and conviction. We study a pilot program in Santa Clara County, CA that aims to address this inequity by providing access to public defenders immediately following arrest.

Methods

The Santa Clara Public Defender agreed to provide pilot services one day per week, rotating the intervention day across weeks. Individuals booked on an intervention day were eligible for early legal representation, while individuals booked on control days received public defender services as usual. The study leverages the rotating treatment day to compare pretrial release and case outcomes between eligible individuals booked on treatment days and eligible individuals booked on control days.

Results

Pilot program participants were 28 percentage points more likely to secure pretrial release, and 36 percentage points more likely to see their cases dismissed, relative to comparable individuals who generally first meet with their public defender at arraignment.

Conclusions

Providing prompt access to legal representation could improve release and case outcomes for low-income individuals and the efficacy of public defense.

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 2024.

By Chloe Anderson Golub, Melanie Skemer

On any given day, nearly 450,000 people in the United States—still legally innocent—are detained while awaiting the resolution of their criminal charges, many because they could not afford to pay the bail amount set as a condition of their release. In response, jurisdictions across the United States are making changes to their pretrial systems to reduce the number of people who are held in pretrial detention. As part of this effort, many jurisdictions are moving away from money bail as a primary means of encouraging people to return for future court dates. Instead, they are increasingly relying on strategies such as pretrial supervision, which requires released people to meet regularly with supervision staff members, and special conditions, such as electronic monitoring and sobriety monitoring. In theory, the added layer of oversight that these release conditions provide would encourage people to appear for court dates and avoid new arrests. Yet until the last two years, research on the effectiveness of these conditions was either limited (in the case of pretrial supervision) or had faced methodological limitations and yielded mixed findings (in the case of special conditions). A more rigorous understanding of the effectiveness of these release conditions is critical, particularly given their immense burdens and costs to both jurisdictions and people awaiting the resolution of their criminal charges. This brief synthesizes findings from three recent impact studies that assessed the effectiveness of varying intensities and modes of pretrial supervision, as well as electronic monitoring and sobriety monitoring, at ensuring court appearances and preventing new arrests. Among the most rigorous evaluations of pretrial monitoring conducted to date, these studies were set across five geographically diverse U.S. jurisdictions. Findings from each of the three studies are presented in the sections below, followed by a discussion of overarching policy and practice implications. In sum, these analyses suggest that more restrictive levels and modes of pretrial supervision and special conditions do not improve the rates at which clients appear in court or avoid arrest, at least among those assessed as having a low to moderate probability of pretrial noncompliance (that is, failing to appear in court or being rearrested during the pretrial period). Jurisdictions should consider reducing their reliance on these release conditions and instead seek less restrictive requirements to support pretrial compliance among this population. 

New York: MDRC,   2024. 7p.