SJC Exchange Library

Pretrial detention, often resulting from a defendant’s inability to afford bail, is one of the primary drivers of incarceration nationwide. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that two out of three people in local jails in 2016 were held while awaiting trial, having not yet been convicted of a crime.
Jurisdictions looking to safely reduce their use of bail and pretrial detention have increasingly turned to automated or actuarial risk assessments. These tools employ a mathematical formula, or algorithm, to estimate the probability of a defendant incurring a new arrest or failing to appear in court. Typically, in a risk assessment, defendants’ criminal history, criminogenic needs, and/or basic demographic information, such as age and gender, are weighted and combined, generating a score which can be used to group defendants into risk categories ranging from low to high.
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