As New York City and CJA work to reduce unnecessary pretrial detention, understanding who is detained on Rikers Island, and what got them there, is a critical piece of the puzzle. When looking at why certain people are detained, the seriousness of someone’s charge might seem like an obvious place to start. But criminal court data paints a more complex picture.

CJA, in partnership with Luminosity, created its public pretrial data dashboards to make New York City’s vast court system easier to understand and to give the public a shared set of facts about what happens before a case is resolved. The dashboards let users explore questions about prosecuted arrests, release, and case outcomes, with a host of filters to let people dig deeper into the data.

During a recent City Council meeting, there was a discussion surrounding how CJA’s How Many Criminal Cases Are Prosecuted in NYC? dashboard applied to Manhattan. The data shows that misdemeanor and non-violent felony cases make up a substantial share of cases involving people who are detained for the entire period before trial. Even after accounting for an important quirk in how some of these cases are counted, that remains largely true.

At the same time, having a misdemeanor or non-violent felony case while detained does not always mean that particular charge is what is keeping someone on Rikers. The difference comes down to a nuance of the pretrial dashboards that can be easy to overlook: a case is not the same thing as a person.

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