KAH Webb, SA Riley, MT Wells

Pretrial risk assessment tools are used in jurisdictions across the country to assess the likelihood of "pretrial failure," the event where defendants either fail to appear for court or reoffend. Judicial officers, in turn, use these assessments to determine whether to release or detain defendants during trial. While algorithmic risk assessment tools were designed to predict pretrial failure with greater accuracy relative to judges, there is still concern that both risk assessment recommendations and pretrial decisions are biased against minority groups. In this paper, we develop methods to investigate the association between risk factors and pretrial failure, while simultaneously estimating misclassification rates of pretrial risk assessments and of judicial decisions as a function of defendant race. This approach adds to a growing literature that makes use of outcome misclassification methods to answer questions about fairness in pretrial decision-making. We give a detailed simulation study for our proposed methodology and apply these methods to data from the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services. We estimate that the VPRAI algorithm has near-perfect specificity, but its sensitivity differs by defendant race. Judicial decisions also display evidence of bias; we estimate wrongful detention rates of 39.7% and 51.4% among white and Black defendants, respectively.

Cornell University Pre-publication paper: 2023. 33p,

By Katherine Hood, Daniel Schneider

  Despite growing interest in bail and pretrial detention among both academic researchers and policymakers, systematic research on pretrial release remains limited. In this article, we examine bail and pretrial release practices across seventy-five large U.S. counties from 1990 to 2009 and look at the contextual correlates of bail regime severity. We find tremendous intra-county variation in bail practices, as well as a nationwide decline in the use of nonfinancial release and doubling of bail amounts during this period. This variation is not accounted for by differences in case composition across jurisdictions or over time. Patterns of bail practices are associated with political, socioeconomic, and demographic factors, however. Implications of these findings for future research on bail and pretrial detention are discussed.  

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 5, No. 1,  (February 2019), pp. 126-149

By René Ropac and Michael Rempel

This report examines the impact of New York’s bail reform law on recidivism in New York City. We sought to produce a credible analysis of the impact of releasing people under reform who would have otherwise faced bail or pretrial detention. 

Key Findings:

• Eliminating bail for most misdemeanor and nonviolent felony charges reduced recidivism. There were reductions for any re-arrest (44% vs. 50%) and felony re-arrest (24% vs. 27%) over two years.

• For people remaining legally eligible for bail (most of whom were charged with violent felony offenses), reducing the use of bail through measures such as supervised release expansion or requiring judges to set the least restrictive condition did not affect recidivism in either direction.

• The 2020 amendments targeted a specific subgroup of people whose re-arrest rates had increased under the original reforms.

• Beyond the aforementioned overall takeaways, bail reform had varying recidivism effects depending on people’s charges and recent criminal history.

New York: Data Collaborative for Justice, 2023. 56p.

By Ella J. Siegrist, Jenna L. Dole, Kristine Denman, Ashleigh Maus, Joel Robinson, Callie Dorsey, and Graham White

In November 2016, New Mexico voters approved a constitutional amendment altering pretrial release and bail practices for felony cases within the state. As part of a multi-phase study, this report evaluates the implementation of bail reform thus far. We primarily used information from stakeholder interviews; this was supplemented with court observations, media coverage, and legal documents. In this report, we document the current pretrial process; the way that pretrial release and detention decisions are made; the perceived impact of the amendment; reform success and areas for improvement; and recommendations for how New Mexico and other states may improve pretrial practices.

Albuquerque, NM: New Mexico Statistical Analysis Center. Institute for Social Research, 2020. 131p.

By Kristine Denman, Ella Siegrist, Joel Robinson, Ashleigh Maus, Jenna Dole

Like other jurisdictions and states across the nation, New Mexico recently reformed its bail system. In 2016, New Mexico voters passed a constitutional amendment intended to ensure that defendants are not detained solely because they are unable to post bond, while simultaneously protecting the safety of the community. The New Mexico Statistical Analysis Center has engaged in an ongoing project to assess bail reform efforts in New Mexico. The current report focuses on one aspect of bail reform: the use of preventative detention.1

Albuquerque, NM: New Mexico Statistical Analysis Center. Institute for Social Research, 2021. 50p.

By Catherine Heard and Helen Fair

This report presents our research on the use of pre-trial imprisonment in ten contrasting jurisdictions: Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, the United States of America, India, Thailand, England & Wales, Hungary, the Netherlands and Australia. A key objective of the research is to learn from disparities in the use of pre-trial imprisonment across the ten countries and to identify transferable lessons about how to prevent its misuse.  

London: Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research, 2019. 52p.

By Cindy Redcross and Brit Henderson with Luke Miratrix Erin Valentine

Arnold Ventures’ Public Safety Assessment (PSA) is a pretrial risk assessment tool that uses nine factors from a defendant’s history to produce two risk scores: one representing the likelihood of a new crime being committed and another representing the likelihood of a failure to appear for future court hearings. The PSA also notes if there is an elevated risk of a violent crime.

Over 40 jurisdictions across the country have implemented the PSA. Mecklenburg County, North Carolina was one of the first; it began using the PSA in 2014, switching from another risk assessment. This study presents the effects of the PSA and related policy changes in Mecklenburg County. The first report in the series describes the effects of the overall policy reforms on important outcomes. A supplemental second report describes the role of risk-based decision making in the outcomes and describes the effects of the PSA on racial disparities in outcomes and among different subgroups.

Overall, the findings are notable from a public-safety perspective: Mecklenburg County released more defendants and did not see an increase in missed court appointments or new criminal charges while defendants were waiting for their cases to be resolved.

New York: MDRC, 2019. 42p.

By Advancing Pretrial Policy and Research (APPR)

The pretrial system has, in recent years, become a focus of attention for governments, civil rights advocates, the media, and nonprofit organizations. Understandably so: it is the front door of the criminal legal system, and decisions made in the early stages of a criminal case have major impacts on everything that follows. As Berkeley law professor Caleb Foote wrote in 1956, “Pretrial decisions determine mostly everything.” This adage is true for individual cases: whether or not someone is detained while awaiting trial has major impacts on whether they are found guilty, whether they are sentenced to incarceration, and how long those sentences are.Unnecessary detention can also disrupt lives, leading to lost jobs and housing, family instability, and even increased likelihood of rearrest. It is also true for the system as a whole: virtually all of the growth in the U.S. jail population in the 21st century is attributable to pretrial incarceration. Housing people before trial costs county and state governments at least $14 billion annually. So, it is critical that we get pretrial decisions right. But in most of the country, the pretrial system is deeply flawed. There is an overreliance on custodial arrest instead of citations or summonses; release and detention are determined more by money than by judicial officers making intentional decisions about public safety or flight; defense counsel is not present, despite someone’s liberty being at stake; and pretrial services focus on monitoring rather than supporting people in the community. In addition, like the rest of the criminal legal system, the pretrial system suffers from systemic racism, with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) disproportionately arrested and booked, subjected to higher financial conditions of release, and more frequently detained. These practices result in many people who could safely be released remaining in jail, often for long periods. And they do not enhance—and frequently undermine—community safety and well-being. Improving the pretrial system requires a comprehensive approach; we cannot focus on a single decision point or a single agency. And the problems will not be fixed with a single solution such as an actuarial assessment tool or even the abolishment of financial conditions. Rather, we need to look at the system as a whole, involve policymakers from all agencies, and engage the community meaningfully in the improvement process.

Silver Spring, MD: Advancing Pretrial Policy and Research (APPR) , 2022. 29p.