RTI International will continue to collect pretrial data about felony cases from a sample of the 200 largest U.S. counties with the National Pretrial Reporting Program (NPRP) supplement. The project will estimate trends among these 200 counties in the information used to make pretrial release decisions (e.g., prior criminal history, current offense), trends in pretrial release methods (e.g., financial conditions, surety bonds), and patterns of misconduct once released (e.g., missed court appearances, new arrests). The pretrial data collection will continue from an expected launch in July 2022 and will include outreach to courts, jails, and pretrial service agencies in the largest 75 counties and to a sample of 50 counties in the largest 76 to 200 counties. The team includes senior researchers at RTI and our partner organizations: the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), the National Association of Pretrial Service Agencies, and Pragmatica. RTI, NCSC, and Pragmatica will collect pretrial data, court data, jail data, and criminal history records, respectively. Our plan leverages work that has been underway for the past decade, since the NPRP was last administered, that includes advances in data management and analysis technologies (e.g., secure cloud-based storage, parsing and matching algorithms), standardization of court records (e.g., National Open Court Data Standards), and ongoing research in the pretrial field. Our approach is flexible and based on substantive knowledge of the field, strong relationships with key criminal justice stakeholders, and RTI’s extensive survey collection capabilities. The resulting files will measure critical data elements (e.g., pretrial release decision, violations) agreed upon with the Bureau of Justice Statistics within the sampled counties, provide weights to draw inferences about the full sample of 200 counties, and contribute to processes to expand data collection beyond the 200 largest counties.
