I Can’t Unsee the Disparity: Next Steps with Pretrial Assessments

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Dr. Jennifer Lerch is a Research Associate at Justice System Partners (JSP). Her research focuses on organizational change, behavioral interventions, substance use, community corrections, and reentry. She has over ten years of experience working to design, develop, implement, and evaluate evidence-based strategies within justice organizations to help address organizational and client needs. Prior to JSP, Dr. Lerch worked for the Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence! (ACE!) where she led the evaluation, data collection, data management, and produced important study findings on several large-scale projects, including research studies funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, National Institute of Justice, and National Institute on Drug Abuse. She has expertise on the risk-need-responsivity model and has trained community providers and criminal justice practitioners across the country. She has co-authored several peer-reviewed publications and regularly presents her work at national and international conferences.

Shannon Magnuson is an Associate with JSP and a doctoral candidate at George Mason University. Her research primarily investigates organizational change and reform efforts in justice agencies. Ms. Magnuson has over five years of experience providing evidence-informed technical assistance to local, state, and federal justice agencies. She works with agencies on a variety of change efforts, including identifying evidence-based programs to achieve goals, building organizational capacity for change, developing, and facilitating initial and ongoing training for staff, and conducting outcome and process evaluations of change efforts. Ms. Magnuson’s dissertation is entitled: Solitary Diversion: Reforming Restricted Housing Units for Severely Mentally Ill Inmates. It describes one state’s effort to reform segregation for a special population and assesses how the reform changed: the volume and reasons for segregation placement, the experiences of those living and working in segregation, and the decisions administrators make to release individuals from segregation. Like this work, Ms. Magnuson’s publications include articles on prison reform efforts, organizational change in probation, and probation risk assessments.

Michael Menefee is a Research Associate at Justice System Partners (JSP) and a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the effects of jail incarceration, probation supervision, and trauma among justice-involved populations. Michael has completed numerous studies which have been generously supported by the National Science Foundation and UC Berkeley. He has published research on racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequalities in the use of monetary bail and pretrial detention, the effects of jail incarceration on future criminal legal system involvement and labor market outcomes, and educational disparities among justice-involved populations in Michigan. Michael’s dissertation, entitled “Trauma and the Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage” uses nationally representative survey data to study the relationship between childhood trauma and inequalities in adulthood, including educational attainment and criminal legal system involvement.