Justice involvement prediction as individuals age

Abstract

Background: Scholars have recently critiqued pretrial assessments for potentially offering biased predictions of future legal system outcomes for racial and ethnic minorities. While these critiques have limited empirical support, the scholarship has yet to examine the predictive validity and differential prediction of pretrial assessments across another protected class – age. Following the guidance of the life-course literature, the current study serves as the first age-graded evaluation of a pretrial assessment – the Public Safety Assessment –, focused on assessing if the predictive validity and scoring predictions of the tool varies across the life-course.

Methods: The current study relied on pretrial information collected from 31,527 individuals during the Advancing Pretrial Policy and Research (APPR) project. Six logistic regression models were estimated to evaluate the differential prediction of the PSA for individuals from 18- 68 years of age. The results of bivariate models were used to produce AUC estimates at each age.

Results: In contrast with the literature on post-conviction assessments, the results of the current study provided limited evidence that the PSA differential predicted pretrial outcomes for individuals from 18-68 years of age.

Conclusions: The results suggest that the PSA is a valid predictor of pretrial outcomes independent of a defendant’s age.