NCJ Number
75727
Journal
Pretrial Services Annual Journal Volume: 3 Dated: (1980) Pages: complete issue
Editor(s)
D A Henry
Date Published
1980
Length
212 pages
Annotation
This collection of 13 articles examines issues impacting on the provision of pretrial services, programs offering solutions to problems in the field, and pretrial research.
Abstract
The first article in the collection is concerned with factors in the bail-setting decisionmaking process and with guidelines which can be applied to this process. It concludes that the judicial system should develop guidelines for judges' use in systemizing bail decisions and eliminating the inequities in bail setting. The second article considers the reasons why diversion programs have failed to spread and relate the reasons to changes in social perceptions of justice and of the purposes of diversion programming. The third article describes the concept of innocence until proven guilty as a concept dating from English common law which, despite recurrent criticisms, has increasingly become a part of formal statute. Efforts to reduce pretrial detention through increased nonbail release are described in a fourth article, which details efforts in Salt Lake County, Utah to simplify defendant interviewing and processing procedures. Suspect flight, the value of high surety bonds, and basing bail decisions on defendant probability of appearing in court are three bail myths described in the fifth article. Other articles discuss the successes of a Tennessee diversion program in reducing costs and recidivism, a Canadian pretrial release program operated by private agencies, the application of systems management techniques such as queueing theory and PERT strategies to trial delay problems, and traditional solutions to trial delay problems. Additional articles examine the implications for pretrial detention of the Supreme Court's decision in Bell v. Wolfish, a Fairfax County, Va. program which has had 93 percent of its shoplifting clients complete community restitution programming and a pretrial program planning model with centralized State leadership. Further articles compare role perceptions of pretrial services officers and other judicial system workers, and conclude from an assessment of neighborhood justice centers that such centers were successful in informally mediating low-level disputes, but that they required greater public awareness efforts and better linkage with the formal judicial system. Footnotes, tabular data, and charts are included. Bibliographies are provided for some articles.