“Pretrial services” is code for putting someone on probation by a government agency before they have been convicted of a crime. 

Pretrial services officers, which are no different than probation officers, directly supervise those charged with a crime by imposing screening for drugs and alcohol, check-ins, GPS monitoring, house arrest, supervising the person’s movements, imposing curfews, requiring treatment, and other invasive correctional technologies.  In many, if not most jurisdictions, defendants or their families pay for the trammeling of their own liberties at the hands of government run pretrial services.  In many cases, the government contracts out pretrial services to private corporations who get paid from the funds of persons charged with a crime but not convicted.

In addition, when a jury says you are not guilty, do you get the money back from pretrial services?  No.  How about when a prosecutor dismisses a case due to police brutality and lack of evidence.  Does that person get their money back.  Absolutely not.  Pretrial services concedes that they supervise and charge the innocent for their own supervision, and even when they are found innocent by a jury, pretrial services doesn’t care—they keep the defendant’s or family’s money and use it to pay their salaries. 

Also, as part of this process, ordinary law-abiding behavior is criminalized.  For example, a standard term of release may be no consumption of alcohol.  Thus, having one alcoholic drink could be classified as a violation or even a new crime.  Pretrial services, upon discovering the violations, then requests that the person’s release is revoked and they are put back into jail and left to rot before the trial commences.

Pretrial services is singly-handedly responsible for destroying the presumption of innocence in this country over the last 40 years.  Instead, they operate typically with a computer algorithm that scores risk or their own “judgment” as to who is risky.  This risk methodology has been shown to be a leading driver of generational mass incarceration.

In addition, pretrial services officers have an absolute financial conflict of interest—they evaluate the defendants and then recommend to the judge the supervision they are to provide for which they can financially charge people merely accused of a crime.   Thus, they have a direct financial incentive to over-recommend supervision and correctional technologies.  In fact, pretrial services must find a certain percentage of defendants risky and order a certain number of defendants to go on supervision by them, otherwise they would de-justify the need for pretrial services and their own existence.  The truth is, we don’t need pretrial services—the country for the nearly 200 years that preceded generational mass incarceration operated just fine without pretrial services.

Pretrial services destroys the presumption of innocence and subjects defendants to supervision by the very government that seeks to prosecute, convict and imprison them.  That is an inherent conflict, and allows the presumption of innocence to be destroyed at the mere lodging of a criminal charge.  John Adams, in defending the soldiers who fired in the Boston Massacre, made clear the importance of the presumption:

“We are to look upon it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should suffer. The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world, that all of them cannot be punished; and many times they happen in such a manner, that it is not of much consequence to the public, whether they are punished or not.  But when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, it is immaterial to me, whether I behave well or ill; for virtue itself, is no security. And if such a sentiment as this, should take place in the mind of the subject, there would be an end to all security what so ever.”It’s time to end government supervision of the innocent in this country.  Only upon conviction and as an alternative to jail or prison should the state be allowed to direct the movements of a person and impose such onerous liberty-restricting conditions that constitute punishment.  It’s time to end pretrial services and stop the pre-conviction trammeling of the liberties of defendants based merely on the lodging of a criminal charge.