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Category: Project

Description: This project is designed to estimate the impacts of Criminal Justice Reform, including the Public Safety Assessment (PSA), in New Jersey. The PSA is a pretrial risk assessment tool that was developed by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF). The PSA provides judges with information about an individual’s risk of failure to appear for court hearings and risk of a new arrest in order to help them make release decisions at the time of initial appearance for a criminal charge. By providing information about risk and recommendations for release conditions, the PSA is designed to reduce the number of low and moderate risk defendants who are incarcerated pretrial and to ensure high risk defendants who pose a threat to public safety are detained without regard to the individual’s ability to pay monetary bail. In New Jersey, the PSA was introduced along with a broader set of pretrial reforms which included several key components, the largest parts of the reform were: 1) a move to a more objective risk-based system at key decision points in the pretrial process (the PSA for risk assessment and a decision making framework (DMF) for risk management recommendations), 2) the abolishment monetary bail except in a handful of cases with specific serious charges or threats to public safety, 3) enactment of a preventive detention statute, 4) the enactment of speedy trial laws which set limits on the amount of time a defendant could be held awaiting charging and trial, and 5) the introduction of a pretrial supervised release program. Most of these reforms were introduced together on January 1, 2017, although some jurisdictions in the state may have started implementing process changes earlier. The impact analysis will estimate the impacts of the entire package of pretrial reforms on charging decisions, first appearance release conditions, pretrial incarceration, case and crime outcomes.