Wilson Center Faculty Director Brandon Garrett serves as independent monitor for the landmark federal bail reform settlement in Harris County, TX. This third report by the monitor team describes the first eighteen months of work evaluating the implementation of the misdemeanor bail reforms in Harris County, Texas (2021). Read the report
Focus Area: Fairness in Criminal Outcomes
Monitoring Pretrial Reform in Harris County: Second Report of the Court-Appointed Monitor
Wilson Center Faculty Director Brandon Garrett serves as independent monitor for the landmark federal bail reform settlement in Harris County, TX. This second report by the monitor team describes the first year of work evaluating the implementation of the misdemeanor bail reforms in Harris County, Texas (2021). Read the report
Life Without Parole Sentencing in North Carolina
What explains the puzzle of life without parole (LWOP) sentencing in the United States? In the past two decades, LWOP sentences have reached record highs, with over 50,000 prisoners serving LWOP. Yet during this same period, homicide rates have steadily declined. To shed light on what might explain the sudden rise of LWOP, this report […]
Driven to Failure: An Empirical Analysis of Driver’s License Suspension in North Carolina
This study describes North Carolina’s population of suspended drivers and assesses how driver’s license suspension statutes operate relative to geography, race, and poverty level. By: William E. Crozier and Brandon L. Garrett – Duke Law Journal (2020). Read the article
Open risk assessment
Lack of transparency has become pressing in the area of risk assessment, as entire judicial systems have adopted some type of risk assessment scheme. While the types of information used in a risk tool may be made public, often the underlying methods, validation data, and studies are not – nor are the assumptions behind how […]
Juvenile Life Without Parole in North Carolina
This article aims to empirically assess the rise and then the fall in Juvenile Life without Parole (JLWOP) sentencing in a leading sentencing state, North Carolina, to better understand these trends and their implications. By: Ben Finholt, Brandon L. Garrett, Karima Modjadidi, and Kristen Renberg – Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology (2020). Read the […]
Undeliverable: Suspended Driver’s Licenses and the Problem of Notice
This article examines the impact of undeliverable mailings when attempting to survey people in North Carolina whose driver’s licenses had been suspended. These undeliverable mailings suggest that large numbers of people, numbering perhaps in the hundreds of thousands in North Carolina, never receive actual notice of either their court date or the drastic consequence of […]
The Transparency of Jail Data
Beginning in early 2019, the judges and prosecutors in Durham, North Carolina, adopted new bail policies, reflecting a shift in the pretrial detention framework. This essay provides a firsthand look into the pretrial detention data following these substantive policy changes, and the observations serve as a reflection on how the changes in Durham reflect broader […]
Changing the Law to Change Policing: First Steps
The killing of George Floyd and other Black men and women in 2020 brought to the fore longstanding concerns about the nature of policing in the United States and how it undermines racial equity. As an institution, policing needs significant reconsideration. This report outlines a list of urgently-needed reforms, compiled by a small group of […]
Monitoring Pretrial Reform In Harris County: First Report Of The Court-Appointed Monitor
Wilson Center Faculty Director Brandon Garrett serves as independent monitor for the landmark federal bail reform settlement in Harris County, TX. This first report by the monitor team describes the first six months of work evaluating the implementation of the misdemeanor bail reforms in Harris County, Texas (2020). Read the report