First-Month Check-Ins as an Early Indicator in Pretrial Supervision

Cliff Hurt Johnston, Ted Green and Madeline Warren

No 2a5r6_v1, LawArchive from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Pretrial supervision has a short window to keep a person on track to resolve their case without returning to jail, and most of what agencies use to set supervision intensity is fixed at booking. Published pretrial research has found static factors such as criminal history and prior failures to appear more predictive than dynamic ones (Bechtel, Lowenkamp, & Holsinger, 2011), but the findings reported here may challenge that conclusion. This paper asks whether something RePath records from the first day of supervision, the share of scheduled app check-ins a participant completes in the first 30 days, says anything about how the case ends. We examined Missouri pretrial cases across 65 agencies that closed successfully or unsuccessfully between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026 and were open at least 30 days (4,833 closures). Among the 1,504 cases with check-ins scheduled in the first month, participants whose cases closed successfully had completed 68.9% of them and those whose cases closed unsuccessfully 47.3%, a gap of 21.6 points (95% CI 17.2 to 26.0; Cohen's d = 0.67). Participants who completed fewer than half closed unsuccessfully 32.9% of the time, against 14.2% for the rest (risk ratio 2.31). The unsuccessful-closure rate was highest among participants who completed little or none of their first-month check-ins (39.5% at zero) and lowest among those who completed nearly all of them (7.9% at 90–99%; none of 26 at 100%), and first-month completion separated outcomes with an AUC of .69 (95% CI .66 to .72), within the range reported for two validated pretrial risk tools, the Public Safety Assessment (.55–.68) and the federal Pretrial Risk Assessment (.67–.73), though the populations, outcomes and timing differ. The gap held across case-length floors, within agencies, and with excluded closures recoded either way. We report the result with its boundaries: one state, one year, outcomes as provided by agencies, technical revocations and new arrests not separable, and no claim that raising check-in completion changes outcomes. The finding supports first-month check-in completion as an early indicator that gives agencies useful information to act on, with no added assessment burden.

Date: 2026-10-15
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:lawarc:2a5r6_v1

DOI: 10.31228/osf.io/2a5r6_v1

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