As I write this welcome message, CJA has reached an important moment in its rich institutional history.

Three developments are converging:

The City has announced plans to close the Riker’s Island jail complex, which requires reducing the number of individuals jailed in New York City;
New York State has amended its bail reform laws in the most significant fashion since 1970, including eliminating the option of setting monetary bail for all but a small number of cases;
CJA’s updated release assessment, which provides judges with a pretrial release recommendation based on an individual’s likelihood of return to court for all their court dates, is about to be launched.

Taken together, this represents a crossroads for the criminal justice system. Can New York implement new legislation that limits the use of monetary bail while maintaining high court appearance rates? What role can CJA play in helping court actors accomplish these goals?

As New York City’s main pretrial services agency, with staff working 24/7 in each of the main courthouses located in each borough, CJA plays a critical role in implementing pretrial justice reforms. We call CJA’s role in this process “justice in practice” because justice is not just defined in theory but is realized in the day-to-day operations of the court system and in countless face-to-face interactions. In everything that we do – delivering pretrial release assessments to the court, reminding individuals of their upcoming court dates or encouraging them to come back to court if they missed one, helping people pay monetary bail and connecting individuals released pretrial to social workers – CJA strives to treat individuals fairly and with dignity.

This inflection point in New York City’s history will call deeply upon CJA and our close to 300 staff members in translating important policy goals into reality. This website seeks to tell the story of the tools and resources CJA will be using to support this historic process of reform. On our website, you can

Visit the Release Assessment page to learn more about how it was built, the factors included, how the release assessment is scored and how the release recommendation is derived from that score
Go to the Case Analysis Tool to review data about prosecuted arrests in a searchable way
Review CJA’s extensive library of research on pretrial justice outcomes and processes
And check out the employment page to learn more about opportunities to work at CJA during this exciting moment in time

If you are interested in learning more about CJA’s work, please add your email address in the newsletter field at the bottom of the page. Thank you for visiting our website.

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