Newswise — New York University’s Public Safety Lab has joined the National Partnership for Pretrial Justice, a group of more than two dozen research, technical assistance, policy, and advocacy organizations that will work to advance pretrial justice nationally and in more than 35 states across the country.
Supported by Arnold Ventures, NYU’s Public Safety Lab will use data science techniques to study the scope and impacts of pretrial detention in more than 1,000 U.S. counties—including many rural counties that have remained largely unstudied.
“Our pretrial justice system is fundamentally broken,” says James Cadogan, vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures. “Presumption of innocence is a core American value and yet thousands of people are unjustly held in jails across the country simply because they can’t afford to pay bail. This problem was not created in isolation and it cannot be solved that way either. We hope that by supporting a diverse group of leading criminal justice reform researchers, practitioners, thinkers, and institutions, we’re able to disrupt the status quo and achieve our goal of eliminating unnecessary and unjust pretrial detention.”
“We expect the Public Safety Lab’s Jail Data Initiative to produce significant insights for policymakers into the scope and effects of pretrial detention on defendants, particularly in those more rural counties where pretrial detention has increased most dramatically,” explains Anna Harvey, professor of politics at NYU and director of the Public Safety Lab.
Under a three-year, $600,000 grant from Arnold Ventures, the lab’s Jail Data Initiative will produce a database of detailed detention and case records for individual criminal defendants across hundreds of counties in the United States and will use those data to estimate the impacts of pretrial detention on defendants. The resulting database will be made publicly available when the project is completed.
As part of the National Partnership for Pretrial Justice (www.pretrialpartnership.org), the lab will also share its findings with other organizations seeking pretrial justice in order to more directly inform scholarship, practice, and policy.
For a complete list of members and more details about the National Partnership, please visit www.pretrialpartnership.org.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
About the NYU Public Safety Lab
The NYU Public Safety Lab uses the tools of data science and social science to support communities’ efforts to improve public safety outcomes. Coordinating the work of researchers across multiple disciplines and universities, the lab aims to achieve more productive allocations of public safety resources. For more information, please visit publicsafetylab.org.
About Arnold Ventures
Arnold Ventures is a philanthropy dedicated to tackling some of the most pressing problems in the United States. Founded by Laura and John Arnold in 2010, Arnold Ventures’ core mission is to improve lives by investing in evidence-based solutions that maximize opportunity and minimize injustice. More information about Arnold Venture’s work is available at www.arnoldventures.org.
# # #
RSS