Why High-Quality Data is Essential for Policy Decisions: Lessons from Zero Bail

The Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office is the nation’s first and largest public defender office, representing clients in the most populous county for over 110 years. With a vision to be “the finest client-centered criminal defense firm in the country, providing a beacon for evolutionary and revolutionary changes in the justice system,” the office has long recognized the vital role of high-quality data in improving outcomes for clients.

During our two-year partnership with the Public Defender’s Office, Measures for Justice worked on a study analyzing the impact of Los Angeles County’s zero bail policy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we examined whether individuals released without bail returned to court at the same rates as those who posted bail. The findings of this study had the potential to influence critical policy decisions, shaping the future of bail reform and affecting thousands of lives.

When we first engaged with the Public Defender’s Office, its case management systems had been in place since the 1990s. These legacy systems mirrored court systems of that era—case-centric rather than client-centric—making it difficult to draw meaningful insights about how individuals moved through the legal system. Unlike modern relational databases, where cases, clients, charges, custody status, and court events are clearly linked, these older systems required significant effort to piece together a coherent dataset for analysis.

During our engagement, we learned that the Public Defender’s Office was undergoing a massive system modernization, consolidating 23 separate legacy systems and digitizing over 100,000 boxes of paper case files into a modern, client-centric case management system. This transformation allowed for more accurate data, clearer relationships between clients and cases, and a more comprehensive view of custody status and court events.

Initially, we worked with the available data from the Public Defender’s legacy system. However, because of how the data had been structured decades ago, tracking custody status changes over time was challenging. This was not an issue of missing or incomplete data, but rather a structural limitation inherent to the legacy system. After the launch of the new client case management system, the Public Defender’s Office provided us with a new dataset that had a modernized structure, making it possible to conduct a much more accurate analysis.

The results shifted significantly. With the legacy system data, the initial analysis suggested that individuals released without bail returned to court at lower rates than those who posted bail. Had we relied on that dataset alone, the policy implications could have been significant, potentially leading to more people being detained pretrial for minor offenses, increasing jail populations, and exacerbating the well-documented harms of incarceration—job loss, housing instability, and family separation. With the improved dataset, however, the findings showed that zero bail had little to no effect on court appearance rates.

This experience underscores a critical lesson: policy decisions must be based on high-quality, well-structured data. The Public Defender’s Office recognized this early on, investing in a transformative modernization effort that now enables more accurate, client-centered analysis. As an organization, we do not take a position on whether zero bail is good or bad policy. However, we do firmly believe that data integrity is essential to sound policymaking. The Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office is now positioned as a leader in leveraging high-quality data to drive justice reform, ensuring that future decisions are based on the most accurate and comprehensive information available.