2018 Virginia Pretrial Data Project Report
For the 2018 pretrial study, the Sentencing Commission selected individuals with pretrial contact events during Calendar Year (CY) 2018. This period of time was selected in order to establish a pre-COVID baseline of pretrial data. For individuals with more than one contact event during the period, only the first event was selected. Individuals were tracked for a minimum of 15 months (until the disposition of the case or March 31, 2020, whichever occurred first). Data for the Project was obtained from numerous criminal justice agencies in Virginia. Compiling the data into a singular dataset required many iterations of matching, merging and data cleaning to ensure accuracy when linking information from the respective data systems to each defendant in the cohort. More than 500 data elements were captured for each defendant, including demographics, charging details, criminal history records, pretrial release status, bond type and amount, court appearance by the defendant, new criminal arrest during the pretrial period, and final dispositions. The overall CY2018 cohort contains nearly 356,000 adult defendants.
2018 Virginia Pretrial Data Project Report
2018 Pretrial Data Project Dashboard
Click below to download the publicly available datasets (154MB).
Data continues to be reviewed, revised, and validated as necessary. Based on a subsequent review of the data and an availability of more comprehensive data sources, it was found that some variables need to be modified and updated. The value assignments of defendants were updated to more correctly reflect defendant’s information provided by following variables:
Indicator_BailTermSetByCourt
Indicator_PresumptiveDenialOfBail19.2_120
The updated data for these variables were posted on January 27, 2023.
Virginia’s Pretrial Data Project: Findings from the 2018 Cohort Powerpoint Presentation from November 9, 2022