RT Article
T1 Revalidation of the Federal PTRA: Testing the PTRA for Predictive Biases
JF Criminal justice and behavior
VO 46
IS 2
SP 234
OP 260
A1 Cohen, Thomas H.
A2 Lowenkamp, Christopher Tyson
LA English
YR 2019
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1702924351
AB The pretrial risk assessment instrument (PTRA) was developed for use in the U.S. federal pretrial system. Specifically, this instrument was constructed to help officers assess the likelihood that defendants will commit pretrial violations including being rearrested for new crimes, missing court appearances, or being revoked while on pretrial release. This research evaluates the PTRA’s capacity to predict pretrial violations on 85,369 defendants with officer-completed PTRA assessments. Bivariate and multivariate models were estimated by race, ethnicity, and sex. Results show that the PTRA performs well at predicting pretrial violations as the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve ranged from 0.65 to 0.73 depending upon the subsamples and outcomes being predicted. Moreover, the PTRA predicted new criminal arrest activity equally well for non-Hispanic Whites and Blacks, while for Hispanics and females, findings show the instrument validly predicting rearrest activity, with some evidence of overprediction depending upon the outcome being examined.
K1 Pretrial risk assessment instrument
K1 Federal pretrial release
K1 Recidivism prediction
K1 Predictive bias
DO 10.1177/0093854818810315