Celebrating 50 Years of Justice in Practice

Letter from Aubrey Fox, CJA Executive Director

As I read and reflect on this document, I’m struck by how CJA’s core values of commitment, fairness and innovation have driven the institution from its founding to the present day.

For five decades, our staff have worked 24/7 in the city’s main courthouses, discharging our historic mission to treat people humanely, provide judges with critical information designed to encourage nonmonetary conditions of release, improve court appearance rates and provide data insights about critical pretrial justice issues. CJA’s unique status as an independent nonprofit with a fundamental role in the pretrial process and deep access to data has also allowed the agency to experiment in critical moments such as our launch of the Supervised Release program in Queens in 2009 and our more recent work to make a common and trusted set of pretrial facts publicly available through pretrial data dashboards.

Since 1973, we’ve seen gradual improvements in pretrial outcomes that have added up to transformational change, as New York City has dramatically reduced its jail population while also improving public safety.

I’m deeply grateful for the contributions made by the people profiled and pictured in these pages. This includes the CJA interviewers (now called Pretrial Associates) who continue to work diligently throughout New York City, CJA’s founding executive director Jeremy Travis and the teams behind the Supervised Release program and our pretrial data dashboarding work.

I am very excited to celebrate CJA’s 50th anniversary, and to share this history with you.