Restoring accountability in pretrial release: the Philadelphia pretrial release supervision experiments

As drug arrests and jail overcrowding added pressure to increase pretrial release in localities during the 1980s and 1990s, the need to manage a larger and higher-risk pretrial population of defendants awaiting adjudication in the community became a high priority for justice agencies. In the late 1990s Philadelphia officials sought to discover the ingredients of a successful supervision strategy through four interlinked field experiments to provide an empirical basis for a major reform of the pretrial release system. The results of the linked randomized experiments question common assumptions about “supervision,” its impact and effectiveness, about the underlying nature of the noncompliant defendant, and deterrence implications. The study emphasizes the importance of interpreting the findings in the context of implementation of the policy reform. Findings suggest that facilitative notification strategies wield little influence on defendant behavior and that deterrent aims are undermined by the system's failure to deliver consequences for defendant noncompliance during pretrial release. The most significant contribution of the article is its illustration of a major evidence-based policy reform undertaken by a major court system.     

Garcia and the Political Safeguards of Federalism: Is There a Better Solution to the Conundrum of the Tenth Amendment?

In Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985),Justice Harry Blackmun held that the Tenth Amendment does notprevent the Congress from subjecting state and local governmentsto the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, concludingthat the "political safeguards offederalism" are generally adequateto protect state interests on the national scene. This articleexamines the intellectual foundations of the "political safeguardsof federalism" and finds them inadequate. It then surveys thepost-Garcia scholarship to ascertain whether an alternativetheory of the Tenth Amendment has emerged. Concluding that ithas not, the author suggests the need for afresh approach inview of the hints contained in Justice Sandra Day O'Connor'sopinion in Gregory v. Ashcroft (1991) that five justices maybe ready to reexamine the central thesis of Garcia.