What is a bond data dashboard, and how will it change criminal justice in the Valley?

Who should go to jail and who shouldn’t while awaiting trial?

It’s a seemingly simple question with complex answers. According to Staunton criminal justice planner Dave Pastors, studies show that the decision to detain someone in the pre-trial process can have lasting impacts on recidivism rates. Recidivism refers to the likelihood of a person to become involved with crime after previously being arrested.

“Research shows that for individuals involved in low-level nonviolent offense to be held in jail for three days, a week, ten days, it’s a life-altering situation,” Pastors said, adding, “It could put them into a situation where they’re more likely to reoffend instead of being released on something like pre-trial supervision.”

At a recent Blue Ridge Criminal Justice Board meeting, Pastors presented data on bond and pre-trial decisions as part of a pilot program for a new pre-trial risk assessment standard. Staunton, Augusta County, and Waynesboro were chosen as one of three pilot sites in Virginia. According to Pastors, the area was chosen because it represented a rural population in the state and because of the area’s involvement with prior research.

In order to figure out how the new standard would fit in to the area, a group of 15 criminal justice stakeholders called the Queen City Collaborators are working with a consultant based out of Colorado. One of the first things they realized they needed was more data.

How do judges decide who will be detained and who will be released while awaiting trial?

“It used to be that decisions of criminal justice were made by assumptions and by how strongly the public felt or how newsworthy things were or things of that nature as opposed to collecting data and then making decisions based on what the data show,” Pastors said. He has worked in the criminal justice field for decades, including time as the director of Blue Ridge Court Services.

Back in the early 2000s, Pastors was part of incorporating the Virginia Pre-Trial Assessment Instrument (VPRAI) in Staunton. Pre-trial officers would visit Middle River Regional Jail and interview the population that was detained while awaiting trial. The interview is thorough, covering an individual’s job, living situation, mental health, and prior criminal offenses. Using that information with other background resources, the pre-trial officers would then make a recommendation to the judge about whether the individual should be detained or released into a different pre-trial program. Judges don’t always follow recommendations, as they’ll also hear arguments from the Commonwealth’s attorney in each case.

The VPRAI has been through multiple revision and validation processes and a similar model dubbed the “Virginia model” has been adopted across the country, according to Pastors. But a new pretrial assessment tool, the Public Safety Assessment (PSA), has entered into the picture. The PSA process doesn’t include a personal interview with each individual, but rather is based entirely on the individual’s background and criminal history. Pastors said that the new tool may potentially be more predictive than the VPRAI, and will likely soon become the national standard.

“For those of us who were involved in the original VPRAI, we’re kind of enamored with the VPRAI,” Pastors said. “But work so far shows PSA is highly predictive of a person’s likelihood of being re-involved with an offense or fail to appear in court.”

Pastors indicated that due to the familiarity of the VPRAI with judges and pre-trial offices, it could be continued alongside the PSA for some time. At this point, it’s unclear just how the PSA will be phased into everyday pre-trial work.

Where does the bond data dashboard factor into all of this?

“We’re trying to collect data that is readily available but we’ve never collected in an organized way to help us in making decisions in how we’ll implement the new public safety assessment,” Pastors said. The idea actually come from Fairfax County, where the Commonwealth’s Attorney had already built his own bond data dashboard.

“It was a good opportunity for us to use something like that to learn more about how judicial decision process was affected by the reports that we do,” Pastors said.

The data that goes into the bond data dashboard is collected from VPRAIs and eventual outcomes in judicial decisions. When the report was put together, there were 214 defendants who had been in bond hearings. Around 75% of that population had a VPRAI done on them.

“The whole concept is to be proactive, collect data, understand where we are as a community, use the data where our strengths and weaknesses are, and how we can make the bond decisions process more fair and equitable but also safe,” Pastors said.

What does the data show, and what does it mean?

Pastors admits that the bond data dashboard isn’t the most exciting thing for the average person, but the insights gleaned from it are instrumental for the future of criminal justice in the area. In the data that Pastors presented to the board, two major takeaways are that Commonwealth’s attorneys are more likely to recommend detention than pre-trial officers, and that judges tend to side with pre-trial recommendations in most categories.

On the Commonwealth’s attorneys side, that logically tracks, according to Pastors.

“Prosecutors have public safety role in community, so they are less likely to recommend release,” Pastors said. There’s an element of politics that could play into that, as Commonwealth’s attorneys are elected officials and Pastors pointed out that there will always be some in the community that believe jail is always the outcome for breaking the law. Research has shown that detention lasting longer than two days has a tremendous impact on a person’s life, and puts them more at risk for becoming involved in the criminal justice system again.

On the judges’ side, Pastors laughed when considering the landscape of judicial decisions just 15 years ago.

“Judges were holding a lot of people or requiring high cash bail,” Pastors said, adding, “What has happened is judges have become more educated in bail release proceedings.”

Pastors said that as judges have been repeatedly told about the reliability and importance of pre-trial documentation like the VPRAI, their decision making has fallen more in-line with those recommendations rather than those of prosecutors.

The data would then lend itself to showing the effectiveness of the VPRAI, and would help inform how the new PSA could be incorporated into the process. The pilot program is expected to last well in to 2024, and it could be years before the PSA becomes a regular part of the criminal justice system. The end goal, according to Pastors, is a criminal justice system that is fair, equitable, and safe.

How would that get measured? One important metric is looking at how much of the pre-trial release population avoided any other future run-ins with the law. That doesn’t paint the entire picture, as Pastors said he’d want to evaluate how many of that population kept their jobs and maintained stable housing.

Keeping people from being involved and improving recidivism has far reaching effects on things like expenses and potential jail expansion. Pastors said that it costs around $90 a day to house an inmate at Middle River Regional Jail, while a pre-trial supervision program would only cost around $3.50 a day.

“The vast majority of people complete pre-trial programs,” Pastors said.

From the archives on recidivism: Explaining recidivism rates in Virginia, why the conversation around them is limited

More: Four dead in Augusta County plane crash on Mine Bank Mountain; investigators comb wreckage

—Akhil Ganesh is the Government Reporter at The News Leader. You can contact him at aganesh@newsleader.com and follow him on Twitter @akhildoesthings.

This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: What is a bond data dashboard, and how will it change criminal justice in the Valley?