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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 Yakima County, Washington. 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 Yakima County, the PSA was introduced along with a broader set of pretrial reforms which included two other components, 1) the introduction of a pretrial supervised release program and 2) the availability of defense counsel at the Preliminary Hearing (that is, the first court appearance) for a case. All three reforms went into effect countywide on February 1, 2016. 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.