Implementation and Validation of the Public Safety Assessment (PSA): Tarrant County

Constitutionally, justice systems should use the least restrictive means that will ensure individuals charged with crimes appear at their court proceedings and will not commit additional crimes. Achieving this balance is increasingly important as counties face jail crowding issues. As such, many justice systems look to the use of tools that can help inform pretrial release systems—tools that examine the risk of failure to appear and the risk to public safety. The challenge in adopting such tools is that implementation must be grounded in local/state policy and practice and tested to ensure the accuracy of the tools predictive validity.

JMI partnered with the Crime and Justice Institute (CJI) for the implementation and validation of the PSA in Tarrant County, which included:

• Examining local rules and state statutes and local rules relating to bail and for release and detention practices;
• Observing first appearances, pretrial decision-making process, and factors considered in determining pretrial detention;
• Collaborating with stakeholders to define acceptable risk levels for release to create a decision-making framework to delineate release options based on risk level;
• Providing extensive training to all system stakeholders on the research behind decision-making tools, risk factors, use of the decision-making tool and the decision-making framework, and the implementation and administration of the tool;
• Assessing pre-implementation quality insurance to confirm that risk factor scoring is consistent with the risk definitions, to ensure inter- and intra-rater reliability, and to define performance metrics for the system; and
• Validating the extent to which the decision-making tool accurately predicts pretrial misconduct (e.g., failures to appear, new criminal arrests pretrial, and new violent arrest pretrial) within the Tarrant County justice-involved population.

For more information about pretrial risk assessment for our jurisdiction, contact Elaine Borakove at elaineb@jmijustice.org.