Vera and its local partners are developing a pretrial detention decision-making system guided by standards established by the American Bar Association and the National Association of Pretrial Services Agencies. These standards are grounded in the principle that people should be detained pending adjudication only when they pose a significant risk to public safety or of flight. The design of New Orleans Pretrial Services incorporates

• universal screening,
• interviews with defendants and investigation of information prior to first appearance,
• the use of an empirical risk-assessment instrument to guide release decisions,
• the eventual ability to supervise defendants, and
• a court-date reminder system to help defendants meet their obligations

This demonstration project began with a month-long operational trial using a jointly developed risk-assessment instrument. This collaboration among New Orleans criminal justice system stakeholders involved designing the instrument, obtaining access to criminal history data, arranging interviews with recent arrestees, negotiating the confidentiality of pretrial information, and encouraging judicial decision makers to use the resulting information. Next steps involve evaluating the one-month trial period, revising the risk-assessment instrument and the assessment process, and finalizing planning for full implementation. The City of New Orleans has allocated funds to maintain the project through 2012, after BJA grant funds have been exhausted.

Why does New Orleans need a pretrial services system?

New Orleans detains residents at dramatically higher rates than do other U.S. cities and counties. The lack of a sound pretrial detention decision-making process contributes to the extraordinarily high rate of detention—and does so at a high social and economic cost that may jeopardize public safety rather than improve it. Because state law allows the court to detain an individual for 90 days before a prosecutorial charge must be filed, the consequences of a decision to jail an arrested person are especially severe in New Orleans. Although arrest-to-filing times have dropped significantly in recent years, many people are still being detained for weeks without charges, for nonviolent offenses that ultimately lead to non-incarceration sentences if prosecution is initiated. For the city, this represents an unnecessary cost. For detained persons, it can result in lost employment, increased use of public benefits, increased homelessness, disruption of treatment services, and increased criminal activity.

For more information about this project, contact Lisa Simpson.