An Evaluation of CJA’s New Release-Recommendation System (2007)

Abstract

New York City Criminal Justice Agency (CJA) functions as New York City’s pretrial services program. In June 2003, based on several years of research at CJA, a new release-on-recognizance recommendation system for adult defendants was implemented in New York City’s lower courts (Criminal Courts). Unlike the old system, which was based solely on a defendant’s ties to the community, the new recommendation system takes into consideration criminal history as well as community ties. The new system was expected to improve prediction over the old recommendation system by classifying a substantially higher proportion of defendants as low risk while maintaining their failure to appear (FTA) rate at the same level. This report summarizes recent research done to evaluate the success of the new recommendation system in achieving these goals. The evaluation was carried out by making two sets of comparisons: (1) pre-implementation projected distributions and FTA rates for the new system were compared with the actual data obtained after implementation; and (2) distributions and FTA rates for the old system (pre-implementation) were compared to comparable data for the new system (post-implementation).