In 2011, as part of a criminal justice reform package meant to reduce incarceration and its related expenditures, Kentucky became among the first states to require judges to use a risk assessment as part of their pretrial decisions. Similar risk assessments have since proliferated across the country in recent years, as jurisdictions that have decided cash bail is unjust — and potentially unconstitutional — have had to grapple with the circumstances in which to detain people who are too poor to come up with the money.
Risk assessments can give the veneer of a more scientific approach than a judge’s discretion, while dampening critics who argue that getting rid of cash bail allows dangerous people to be released. A large amount of past court data is run through a system that determines what factors appear to correlate with higher rates of rearrest or failure to appear for later court dates. Each jurisdiction decides what factors to weigh more heavily, and the algorithm creates a matrix to determine whether someone is low risk, moderate risk, or high risk. Jurisdictions then decide how the scores get used; in most places, they are given to a judge to consider when deciding whether and how to release someone.