Evaluating Pretrial Services Programs in North Carolina
Federal Probation › Vol. 72 Nbr. 1, June 2008
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Summary
Typically research in the area of pretrial services has been directed toward developing and validating more reliable risk assessment instruments, rather than evaluating the effect of these programs on the defendant, the community, and other components or agencies within the local criminal justice systems. While their study catalogues excellent material for formative evaluations and for comparative purposes, the authors did not assess how these program attributes or factors affect or interact with program performance and defendant outcomes nor the extent to which pretrial programs affect positive change or improvements for the criminal justice system.
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Evaluating Pretrial Services Programs in North Carolina
THE CONCEPT OF PRETRIAL services or pretrial diversion programs was originally delineated in The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, which was the final report of the 1967 Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. Over the course of the last 40 years these programs have experienced significant popularity and acceptance, as demonstrated by the widespread distribution of Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) funds during the early 1970s to establish and expand this alternative to detention; they have also experienced significant periods of disrepute and decline. These programs fell into disfavor during the 1980s and were all but dismissed as over-rated failures by researchers and policymakers.
A revival began in the 1 990s and continues today, with pretrial services programs being touted as a more cost effective and treatment-oriented approach to housing indigent and special population defendants in a county detention facility for lengthy periods of time before trial. Pretrial programs are also advocated as tools for preventing jail or detention center overcrowding and as a mechanism for ensuring that defendants appear in court, thus reducing failure to appear arrest warrants and eliminating unnecessary court continuances and delay. These programs also reduce the size of court dockets and the number of criminal trials and improve judicial processing efficiency by dismissing charges against the defendants upon their successful completion of the pretrial program conditions; thus substantially reducing the amount of time the court expends per defendant (Bellassai, n.d.).As Mahoney, Beaudin, Carver, Ryan and Hoffman (200 1) cogently note, pretrial services programs perform two essential functions. Program staff compile relevant information about new defendants in order to provide judicial decision-makers with more complete and reliable data for making informed decisions regarding the defendants' release or custody status prior to trial. These programs also perform the ess...See the full content of this document
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