Topic: Pretrial

Research Report

Bail Courts Pretrial July 31, 2023

Understanding and Reframing an Individual’s Failure to Appear in Court

Shannon Magnuson, Senior Associate, Justice System Partners

Failure to appear in court is often a disproportionate driver of jail populations. It is important to understand it better and to reframe it, as part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC)—which is reducing jail populations across America. Justice System Partners (JSP), a technical assistance provider to the Safety and Justice Challenge, recently conducted an in-depth study about why people do not get to court as scheduled in Lake County, Illinois. Leadership there know even one night in jail can be disastrous for some people. It can lead to a host of negative consequences including loss of employment. But they saw bench warrants for missing court were also driving their jail population at a disparate rate. That is why they wanted to know more about why people miss court.

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Research Report

COVID Data Analysis Incarceration Trends Pretrial November 18, 2022

Measuring Progress: The Fall & Rise of Jail Populations During the Pandemic

Cecilia Low-Weiner, Brandon Martinez, Benjamin Estep, CUNY Institute for STate and Local Governance

A Closer Look at COVID-19’s Effect on Bookings in Safety and Justice Challenge Communities

Across the country, counties seeking to curb the overuse and misuse of jails have looked to a common entry point to do so: their front doors. Since the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) launched in 2015, participating communities have implemented data-driven strategies that have helped reduce the number of people booked into their jails, reductions often closely linked to declines in overall jail population. By January 2020, just prior to the onset of COVID-19, bookings had declined in SJC communities overall by 13 percent, with no negative impacts on community safety: crime trends remained stable or decreased following SJC implementation. When the pandemic started spreading across the United States in early 2020—especially rapidly within jails—SJC communities began implementing emergency measures to reduce their jail populations, many of which directly impacted bookings and resulted in steep declines.

In an effort to understand how these declines were achieved in individual communities, and gain insight into how to sustain these lowered populations, SJC site coordinators collected information on the strategies implemented and closely tracked jail trends. This brief seeks to expand upon findings from Measuring Progress—an online tool developed by the CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance (ISLG) that measures jail trends since SJC implementation—to explore booking-related trends across communities pre- and post-COVID, offering a first look at how some of these emergency decarceration strategies may have impacted trends and what has happened since normal operations have resumed.

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Research Report

Human Toll of Jail Pretrial October 12, 2022

Cages Without Bars

Patrice James, Illinois Black Advocacy Initiative
James Kilgore, MediaJustice
Gabriela Kirk, Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University
Grace Mueller, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts
Sarah Staudt, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts
Emmett Sanders, Challenging E-Carceration
LaTanya R. Jackson Wilson, Shriver Center on Poverty Law

Pretrial Electronic Monitoring Across the United States

Across the United States each year, hundreds of thousands of people accused but not yet convicted of crimes are required by the courts to participate in electronic monitoring programs. These people are fitted with a locked, tightened ankle shackle, which often tracks every move they make.

Pretrial electronic monitoring programs represent a fast-growing type of incarceration that imposes significant harm and burdens on people who are subject to it. We interviewed people subject to monitoring, program administrators, judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys across select jurisdictions to better understand how pretrial electronic monitoring is used.

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Research Report

Data Analysis Pretrial July 1, 2022

Expanding Supervised Release in New York City

Safety and Justice Challenge, Center for Court Innovation

In 2015, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a multi-year initiative to reduce populations and racial disparities in American jails. To advance knowledge development grounded in a research agenda that explores, evaluates, and documents site-specific strategies to safely and effectively reduce jail populations and address racial and ethnic disparities, the Foundation engaged the Institute for State & Local Governance (ISLG) at the City University of New York (CUNY) to establish and oversee an SJC Research Consortium. Consortium members are nationally renowned research, policy, and academic organizations collaborating with SJC sites to build an evidence base focused on pretrial reform efforts.

Under New York City’s Supervised Release Program (SRP) individuals awaiting trial are released under community supervision to ensure their return to court, instead of via bail or pretrial detention. Defendants are eligible for the citywide SRP if they meet specific criteria, including arrest charge type, estimated risk status, and community ties. Towards the goal of reducing the jail population, New York City expanded the City’s Supervised Release Program (SRP) several times by altering the eligibility criteria to include a wider range of individuals. The first large expansion of SRP since 2016 occurred at the beginning of June 2019. A subsequent program expansion occurred in December 2019 as New York State prepared for 2020 bail reform legislation to go into effect.

In an effort to better understand the impact of expansion of SRP as a jail-reduction strategy, ISLG and the SJC Research Consortium funded the Center for Court Innovation to examine the impact of the June 2019 expansion. The Center conducted a time series analysis to determine if observed post-expansion SRP enrollment and/or detention rates significantly differed from predicted rates. The study found that the expansion increased SRP rates across racial groups and reduced detention for non-violent felony offenses, though not for misdemeanor offenses. In addition, the findings show increased use of SRP for misdemeanor offenses, which may suggest net-widening.

Key takeaways:

1. Increasing program participation does not always decrease detention. For small program expansions (like the 2019 expansion) to have a true impact on detention, these initiatives must target serious crimes that are likely to be detained.

2. Large changes are needed for large impact. Larger expansions, especially those that are driven by legislative change (like the December 2019 expansion in preparation for bail reform), can have a greater impact on detention compared to smaller expansions.

3. Targeted efforts to reduce racial disparities are necessary. Disparities are not automatically impacted by increasing program participation and decreasing detention across the board. To reduce racial disparities, targeted efforts must be made.

Together, the findings suggest that the SRP expansion reduced detention for some offenses and highlight the importance of measuring the impact of program implementation and expansion to inform future work and jail reduction efforts in New York City and other jurisdictions.

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Research Report

Collaboration Incarceration Trends Pretrial Racial and Ethnic Disparities April 26, 2022

Population Review Teams: Evaluating Jail Reduction and Racial Disparities Across Three Jurisdictions

Joanna Weill, Amanda B. Cissner, and Sruthi Naraharisetti

Nearly one-third of those incarcerated across the U.S. are held in local jails, mostly held during the pretrial period, before they have been convicted of any crime. Among those detained in local jails, Black individuals are disproportionately represented, making up more than a third of the jail population in 2019.

Within this context of a national overreliance on jail, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) in 2015. This effort supports local jurisdictions across the country in their search for safe and effective ways to reduce jail populations and eliminate racial and ethnic disparities.

Currently implemented in more than a dozen cities around the country, jail Population Review Teams (PRTs) are one strategy to reduce jail populations. Funded by the SJC and with guidance from ISLG, the Center for Court Innovation conducted a quantitative research study of the PRT model and its impacts in three sites through the spring of 2020: Lucas County, Ohio; Pima County, Arizona; and St. Louis County, Missouri. Although the sites did not design their PRTs to explicitly reduce racial disparities, this project helps them to measure the impact of PRTs and continue to work toward disparity reduction.

The analysis found:

• A small impact on the jail population: Ultimately, the PRTs examined resulted in the release of a small proportion of the total jail population during the study period.
• A larger impact, once a case is reviewed: For cases that make it to actual review by the PRT, about half go on to be released.
• PRTs can increase disparities: In St. Louis County, White individuals are more likely than Black individuals to be eligible and recommended by the PRT.
• Small disparity reduction at early PRT stages is not enough: In Lucas and Pima Counties, Black individuals were slightly more likely than White individuals to be eligible for the PRT, but these differences were not sustained past the eligibility stage.

Together, the findings across the three sites suggest that a jail reduction strategy is unlikely to reduce racial disparities if it does not explicitly consider race during the development of program policies. In addition, the PRTs included here impacted a small percentage of the overall jail population. However, feedback from the sites suggests that as a supplement to other local efforts or a driver of broad policy change, the PRT model shows promise in building collaboration, engaging local stakeholders across the system in meaningful discussion about overreliance on jail, and shining a light on potential areas for future efforts.

Additional Downloads

• Policy Brief

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