The Public Safety Assessment is a scoring tool that helps a judge decide whether to release you before trial and under what conditions. It pulls nine data points from your criminal history and produces two numeric scores and one yes-or-no flag that estimate how likely you are to miss court, pick up a new arrest, or commit a violent offense while your case is pending. The scores feed into a local policy chart that suggests release conditions, but the judge makes the final call and is free to depart from the recommendation.
If you’ve been arrested in a jurisdiction that uses the PSA, the report will be in front of the judge at your first appearance. Four states use it statewide — Arizona, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Utah — and hundreds of counties in more than 25 other states have adopted it locally.1Advancing Pretrial Policy & Research. PSA Map Elsewhere, courts rely on a different risk tool, a traditional bail schedule, or judicial discretion alone.
What Goes Into the Score
The PSA uses only verified criminal history and court records. No interviews, no questionnaires, no self-reported information. By design, it excludes race, gender, education, income, and employment status.2Advancing Pretrial Policy & Research. How the PSA Works
The nine factors it does use:
- Age at current arrest, with extra weight for people 22 or younger.
- Whether the current charge is a violent offense.
- Whether you had a pending case at the time of this arrest.
- Prior misdemeanor conviction.
- Prior felony conviction, which carries more weight than a misdemeanor.
- Prior conviction for a violent offense.
- Prior failure to appear in the past two years, weighted more heavily than older misses.
- Prior failure to appear older than two years.
- Prior sentence to incarceration.
Every input comes out of state and national automated databases, not the arresting officer’s narrative or the prosecutor’s file. Same inputs, same score, regardless of which jurisdiction runs the assessment.
The Two Scores and the Violence Flag
The nine factors are weighted differently depending on the outcome being predicted, then converted into three measures:2Advancing Pretrial Policy & Research. How the PSA Works
- Failure to Appear (FTA), scored 1 to 6, estimating the likelihood of missing a court date. A 1 is low risk; a 6 is the highest statistical likelihood of not showing up.
- New Criminal Activity (NCA), scored 1 to 6, estimating the likelihood of any new arrest while the case is pending. It doesn’t predict the type of offense.
- New Violent Criminal Activity (NVCA), a yes-or-no flag rather than a number. The tool looks at the current charge together with any violent history and decides whether to flag you for elevated violence risk.
Lower numbers on FTA and NCA mean a better pretrial outlook. The violence flag works independently: you can score a 2 on FTA and a 3 on NCA and still have the NVCA flag triggered if the current charge is violent and your history supports it. In early Kentucky data, defendants carrying the violence flag were rearrested for violent offenses at 17 times the rate of unflagged defendants, which is why judges pay close attention to it.
How Scores Turn Into Release Conditions
The PSA doesn’t tell the judge what to do. Each jurisdiction that uses the tool builds its own Release Conditions Matrix, a local policy document that maps score combinations to specific recommendations.2Advancing Pretrial Policy & Research. How the PSA Works One county might recommend release on your own recognizance for someone scoring a 2 on both scales with no flag; a neighboring county with a different matrix might require check-ins with a pretrial officer for the same scores. No national standard governs what any particular combination means.
Matrices typically layer conditions as scores rise: unsupervised release at the low end, then court-date reminders by phone or text, then in-person check-ins with pretrial services, then electronic monitoring, and at the top, a recommendation for detention. Where each line sits is a local choice.
At the initial appearance, the judge reviews the PSA report alongside arguments from both sides. No state requires judges to follow the recommendation. The judge weighs the charges, your ties to the community, the prosecution’s position, and anything your attorney brings forward about your situation, then sets conditions that may be stricter or more lenient than the matrix suggests.
Once announced, release conditions are legally binding. If the court orders check-ins, drug testing, a curfew, or electronic monitoring, a violation can produce a warrant and revocation of pretrial release.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 U.S. Code 3148 – Sanctions for Violation of a Release Condition In federal cases, a new felony arrest while on release creates a rebuttable presumption that no conditions can keep the community safe, shifting the burden to you to argue for continued release. Most states have similar rules.
When the Charge Overrides the Score
Certain offenses trigger mandatory detention or a strong presumption of detention no matter what the risk tool says. Federal law creates a rebuttable presumption of detention when there’s probable cause to believe you committed a serious drug trafficking offense carrying 10 or more years, a firearms offense involving violence, or certain offenses against minors.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 3142 – Release or Detention of a Defendant Pending Trial The same statute heightens the presumption if you were already on pretrial release for another offense when the new arrest happened.
States have their own override lists. Capital offenses, certain domestic violence charges, and repeat violent felonies commonly fall into this category. If your charge triggers a statutory presumption, the PSA score becomes largely academic, and the real question is whether you can rebut the presumption favoring detention.
Costs That Come With Release
Release doesn’t always mean walking out free of financial obligations. When the court orders supervision, the costs usually fall on you.
Electronic monitoring is the most expensive common condition. Fees vary by jurisdiction and provider, with some counties charging a flat daily rate and others billing the device, supervision, and administrative overhead separately. At least 26 states authorize electronic monitoring fees without setting a dollar amount, giving monitoring companies wide discretion. Roughly half of all states don’t require courts to consider whether you can actually afford these fees before imposing them.
Drug and alcohol testing adds another layer when it’s ordered. Per-test fees vary widely, and multiple tests a week add up fast. If you can’t pay, ask your attorney about requesting a waiver or reduction — some jurisdictions allow it, but you generally have to ask. Nonpayment can be treated as a violation of release conditions, which carries the risk of revocation.
Challenging a PSA Result
The score is only as accurate as the data behind it, and the data isn’t always right. Expunged cases sometimes still appear in the database. Dismissed charges can be coded as convictions. Failures to appear sometimes turn out to have been caused by hospitalization or custody on another matter. A single misrecorded FTA can bump the score by one or two points and shift the matrix recommendation from unsupervised release to electronic monitoring.
Correcting these errors means pulling court records from the original jurisdiction and comparing them against the criminal history database your PSA pulled from. If the records don’t match, your attorney can present the corrected documents at the pretrial hearing. It’s unglamorous work and it moves the needle.
Legal and Mitigation Arguments
Defense counsel can also raise broader challenges. The Eighth Amendment prohibits excessive bail, and the Supreme Court has held that bail must rest on individualized standards relevant to each defendant, not group-based assumptions.5Justia. Stack v Boyle, 342 US 1 (1951) The PSA, by design, produces group-based statistical projections — it estimates how people with similar profiles behave, not how you specifically will behave. Counsel can argue that a “high risk” label based on aggregate statistics falls short of the individualized determination the Constitution requires.
Mitigation is the other main avenue. Specific conditions can target the specific risk the tool flagged: court-date reminder programs for FTA concerns, substance abuse treatment, transportation assistance, or supervised check-ins. The PSA doesn’t account for these interventions, which gives your attorney room to argue that the raw score overstates the real risk once conditions are in place.
What the Tool Can’t See
The PSA is a standardized, transparent process, and it doesn’t directly penalize poverty the way cash bail does. It also has real limits worth knowing.
Several factors it uses — prior convictions, prior incarceration, pending charges — correlate with race because of documented disparities in policing and prosecution. The tool treats those records as neutral data points, but the records carry the fingerprints of the system that produced them. At least one peer-reviewed study found predictive bias as a function of race and sex in predicting failure to appear.
Every factor in the PSA is also static. It captures a snapshot at the moment of arrest and can’t reflect recent employment, completion of treatment, stable housing, family support, or any other change that might reduce risk. A 35-year-old with a decade-old felony and no recent legal trouble looks identical to the tool as a 35-year-old with the same conviction who was released from prison last month. The PSA score won’t reflect that difference, but your attorney can put it in front of the judge, and the judge is the one who decides.