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Category: Project

Description: This project is designed to estimate the impacts of the Public Safety Assessment (PSA) in Mecklenburg County, NC. 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 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. The PSA was introduced in Mecklenburg County in June 2014, replacing the Virginia risk assessment which was put into place in 2011. The impact analysis will assess the effects of the PSA compared with the Virginia tool. If data become available, the impact analysis will also assess the impact of Mecklenburg County’s move from no pretrial risk assessment to the Virginia pretrial risk assessment in 2011.