Why Communication Matters in Pretrial Justice
Meet the NAPSA Board: Q&A Spotlight
The decisions judges make during the pretrial phase are among the most significant in the criminal justice system. Every release or detention decision requires balancing constitutional rights, public safety, court appearance, victim considerations, and the unique circumstances of each individual before the court. As pretrial practices continue to evolve through research, legislation, and emerging technologies, judicial education has never been more important. Recognizing this need, the National Association of Pretrial Services Agencies (NAPSA) established the Judicial Education Workgroup to ensure judges have access to high-quality, evidence-based education developed specifically for the unique challenges of pretrial decision-making. Through collaboration with judicial leaders from across the country, the workgroup is helping strengthen courts by providing practical, relevant, and peer-driven educational opportunities. Why Judicial Education Matters Judges today face increasingly complex pretrial decisions in an environment of changing laws, evolving case law, heightened public attention, behavioral health challenges, and expanding pretrial services. While every jurisdiction is different, judges across the nation share many of the same questions: How can courts balance public safety with the presumption of innocence? What role should validated pretrial assessments play in judicial decision-making? How should courts respond to individuals experiencing behavioral health or substance use disorders? How can judges navigate public scrutiny while remaining impartial and grounded in evidence-based practices? These challenges require education that goes beyond statutes and case law. Judges benefit from opportunities to learn from one another, discuss emerging issues, and explore practical strategies that improve courtroom decision-making while maintaining judicial independence. A Workgroup Built by Judges, for Judges NAPSA's Judicial Education Workgroup was created to provide exactly that. Comprised of experienced judges and pretrial professionals from diverse jurisdictions, the workgroup brings together a wide range of perspectives to identify educational needs, develop relevant programming, and ensure judicial education reflects both current research and the realities of today's courtrooms. The group's mission is simple but significant: support judges with education that strengthens informed, fair, and evidence-based pretrial decision-making. As Judge Mark Spitzer of the Grant County Circuit Court in Indiana notes: "Despite being a critical stage of criminal procedure, our judicial education programs often neglect the pretrial phase. Pretrial impacts jail populations, recidivism, and criminal justice outcomes. Judges who have a criminal docket, and their communities, can greatly benefit from robust education on the evolving law and evidence-based practices that inform modern pretrial practice." By combining legal expertise with operational knowledge of pretrial systems, the workgroup helps bridge the gap between policy, research, and courtroom practice. Building the Judicial Track One of the Judicial Education Workgroup's most visible accomplishments has been the development of NAPSA's Judicial Track at the Annual Conference. Rather than adapting general conference sessions for judges, the workgroup designed an educational experience specifically for judicial officers. Every session is carefully developed to address issues judges encounter daily while providing practical tools that can be applied immediately upon returning to their courts. Topics are selected based on current legal developments, emerging research, judicial feedback, and real-world challenges facing courts across the country. Sessions are designed to encourage thoughtful discussion while respecting the unique role and responsibilities of the judiciary. This "judges teaching judges" model creates an environment where participants can openly discuss complex issues, exchange ideas, and learn from colleagues who understand the realities of presiding over pretrial proceedings. Addressing the Issues That Matter Most The Judicial Track explores many of today's most pressing issues in pretrial justice, including: Judicial leadership in pretrial release and detention decisions The appropriate use of validated pretrial assessments Behavioral health and substance use considerations Evidence-based pretrial supervision practices Balancing public safety, court appearance, and individual rights Each session emphasizes practical application while remaining grounded in constitutional principles and current research. Learning Through Judicial Collaboration One of the greatest strengths of the Judicial Education Workgroup is its emphasis on peer-to-peer learning. Judges often work independently within their jurisdictions, yet many confront remarkably similar challenges. The Judicial Track creates opportunities for meaningful conversations among judicial officers from across the country, allowing participants to share experiences, discuss successful approaches, and consider new perspectives. These conversations often continue long after conference sessions conclude, building professional relationships that strengthen courts well beyond the annual meeting. Judge Bo Zeerip of the Delta County Court in Colorado captures the importance of this shared commitment: "Judges are unique in the criminal justice system because we have the authority and duty to decide whether to release or detain presumptively innocent accused persons who come before us daily. It is an awesome power to be in a position to take away a person’s liberty prior to a guilty plea or verdict." He adds that judges are "duty bound to honor and protect the constitutional rights of both accused persons and victims, while also promoting community safety and efficient court procedures," emphasizing that continued education helps courts maximize safe pretrial release, court appearance, and public safety. Strengthening Courts and Communities Judicial education extends far beyond professional development. When judges understand evidence-based pretrial practices, local resources, behavioral health considerations, and effective supervision strategies, courts are better positioned to make informed decisions that promote fairness, enhance public safety, and improve court appearance rates. Strong judicial leadership also fosters collaboration among courts, pretrial agencies, prosecutors, defense counsel, behavioral health providers, and community partners. These relationships help create more effective and responsive local justice systems while maintaining public confidence in the courts. Advancing NAPSA's Mission The work of the Judicial Education Workgroup directly supports NAPSA's mission to advance fair, effective, and evidence-based pretrial justice. By developing specialized education for judicial officers, the workgroup strengthens collaboration between courts and pretrial professionals while encouraging consistent application of research-informed practices. The result is a stronger national network of judicial leaders committed to improving pretrial systems and serving their communities. Looking Ahead As pretrial justice continues to evolve, so too will judicial education. Emerging technologies, advances in artificial intelligence, changing legislation, behavioral health initiatives, and increasing public expectations will continue shaping the future of court operations. The Judicial Education Workgroup remains committed to preparing judges to navigate these developments with confidence while preserving the integrity and independence of judicial decision-making. Future educational opportunities will continue to expand as NAPSA explores additional ways to support judges throughout the year. Join the Conversation Whether you are new to the bench or have decades of judicial experience, the NAPSA Judicial Track offers an opportunity to learn from respected judicial colleagues, engage in meaningful discussions, and return home with practical strategies that can strengthen your court. The challenges facing pretrial justice are complex, but they are not faced alone. Through collaboration, education, and shared experience, judges across the country are helping shape the future of pretrial practice—one informed decision at a time. The response to NAPSA's Judicial Track has been tremendous. Due to strong interest from judges across the country, this year's Judicial Track has reached capacity. If you are interested in participating, we encourage you to reach out to the NAPSA team. While attendance for this year's program is currently full, we would be happy to discuss opportunities, answer questions, and add interested judges to our contact list should additional space become available or as we plan future educational offerings. The continued enthusiasm for the Judicial Track reflects the growing recognition that specialized judicial education plays a critical role in strengthening pretrial decision-making and supporting courts nationwide. Although the Judicial Track is currently at capacity for this year's conference, we encourage interested judges to reach out to the NAPSA team. We'd love to connect with you, discuss future opportunities, and keep you informed as the Judicial Education Workgroup continues to expand educational programming throughout the year. We invite you to join us at future NAPSA educational events and experience the Judicial Track firsthand. Together, we can continue building stronger courts, advancing evidence-based practices, and supporting judicial leadership in pretrial justice.
Tina Turner and the Courage to Say Yes to Love I gave a keynote at NAPSA last year — Leading from the Emerging Future of Pretrial — so I felt both honored and challenged when the program committee asked me to build on it with another plenary this year. My new title — Leadership, Love, and Implementation Science in Pretrial — picks up where we left off, but it adds two notions that seem, on their face, paradoxical, unrelated, or even contradictory: Love and Implementation Science . When I think about a life of courage, love, and getting things done, Tina Turner comes to mind. Her gutsy comeback at the age of 44, after surviving abuse, arrived with her hit What’s Love Got to Do with It. Her voice resonates within us, ‘isn’t love just a secondhand emotion, and who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?’ Yet in the song she lets herself be drawn into the scary undertow of life, the tug of love she experiences that is pulling her forward. Loving and living fully are fearful, yet she says yes to life anyway. What Does Love Have to Do with Pretrial? You may be asking what love has to do with leadership and maximizing pretrial release, court appearance, and public safety. It’s a fair question. Some skepticism is well earned in a field that deals directly with the horrible consequences of crime, seeks justice, and runs on law, evidence, risk, and data. We work hard to be rigorous, fair, and effective. In contrast, love can sound soft, sentimental, and out of place — a nice feeling but secondary to the real work, precisely the kind of thing you keep out of serious professional decisions. But what is love? Perhaps it’s best to start with our own concrete experience — recall and allow yourself to re-experience when you ‘fell in love’ for the first time, the birth of your child, or the love you have for a parent, a friend, nature, or a country. These are not fleeting feelings, they are enduring states of being and indicators of value that create a context, and give us the motivation and strength to face life’s challenges. We Are Loved Into Being When our daughter was born, it was love at first sight. Then came the fears, the tensions, the hard work, and the need for help from others. Leaving the hospital carrying her in the baby carrier was joyful — and terrifying. Can we do this? How can we do this? Who can help us? Twenty-five years later, new challenges keep emerging, but these only strengthen and deepen our love. As best they can, parents create a context in which their children can grow and flourish. As newborns we have no language or understanding of what the world is, and no ability to function in it. What babies and young children can do, with incredible capacity, is receive and instantly respond to the love of their parents and wider family. We are, quite literally, loved into being. Love Creates the Conditions for Flourishing A loving context creates a sense of safety which unleashes our inner unrestricted and infinite desire to question, understand, know, value, choose, act, love in return, and flourish. Love is not self-protective. It is self-giving, risky, tremendously difficult to achieve and even harder to sustain. Of course, none of us are loved perfectly and we live in a deeply imperfect world. The absence of love is always wounding — it introduces elements of illegitimate coercion and leaves us anxious, constricted, fearful, self-protective, and insecure. The mixture of loving and the non-loving is real; it gives rise to our potential for good but also to many of the problems which pretrial justice agencies seek to address. Love as Leadership, Creating a Context Where Everyone Can Flourish To be present to love we must transcend ourselves in response to that terrifying tug in our lives. It is not about us; it is about responding to something of value and importance greater than us. To the extent that we intentionally act in this way, we constitute ourselves and reality, making a unique contribution to the flow of history and the arc of justice. Leaders, both formal and informal, have an important role. Their job is to create a context in which their agency and fellow staff — and the systems and institutions of justice — can flourish and meet their true ends. A loving context preserves, carries forward, and goes beyond what is fair or required, allowing this fully human flourishing to take place. The discipline of doing all the hard work to remain loving while building that context, despite the fears, challenges, and forces that constantly threaten to take us off course into what is non-loving, is what it means to be in love with our work. The Leaders Who Love and Inspire Us To me, the luminaries in our field have fallen and stayed in love with pretrial, grounding their extraordinarily intelligent, diligent, painstaking, and value driven work. I think of Chief Justice Rehnquist who asserted, “In our society liberty is the norm, and detention prior to trial or without trial is the carefully limited exception,” ( U.S. v. Salerno ), and so many colleagues like Lori Eville, Spurgeon Kennedy, Tim Schnacke, Barb Hankey ... So, What's Science Got to Do with It? Everything — and, again, not in the way you think. Our field has done a remarkable job of naming what legal and evidence-based pretrial practices should look like. The National Institute of Corrections (NIC), the American Bar Association, and NAPSA have painstakingly traced the history of pretrial jurisprudence and practice, to discern and hand us the essential elements, the outcomes, and the shared standards of excellence we hold ourselves to. We know, in broad strokes, what to do. What most jurisdictions have not yet solved is how to get all the way there, and how to stay there when the training grant ends, the champion retires, or the first hard case hits the news. Implementation science gives us a reliable, repeatable method for exactly that. Its six active implementation frameworks help us foster the competency, organization, and leadership drivers that make change stick and evolve. This includes installing usable practices through defined stages and ongoing coaching rather than one-time trainings as well as running short improvement cycles to self-correct and keep on course. The scientific method is demanding — it must be applied rigorously and systematically, and it requires new learning — but if leaders establish a loving context within an organization, it becomes possible to collectively implement and sustain these implementation frameworks. Context conditions our consciousness and the actions we take. It turns out that love and science walk hand in hand. An Invitation to Reno to Put Love and Science into Practice I’ve spent more than a decade helping agencies use both love and science, as part of the NIC pretrial faculty and, most recently, as an implementation coach to New Mexico’s remarkable Administrative Office of the Court’s statewide pretrial team that has helped all thirteen judicial districts and thirty-three counties of the state to successfully implement legal and evidence-based pretrial justice programs and outcomes. As you prepare for Reno, ask yourself: What’s love — and implementation science — got to do with it, with you and your work in pretrial? Come to the keynote for the fuller story, followed by a two-hour workshop where we will apply these ideas directly to your team, your jurisdiction, and the place you’re most stuck or challenged right now. Bring your hardest case, the place of discord you would rather not face — that is the point. It is the place where you will meet the tension and the scary tug that is calling you to transcend where you are now and get to where you want to be. About the Author:
Meet the NAPSA Board: Q&A Spotlight
Building Leaders, Sharing Innovation, and Strengthening Pretrial Justice Across New Mexico When people talk about successful pretrial reform, they often focus on legislation, policies, or data. Those elements matter—but lasting change begins with people. It begins with leaders who are willing to learn together, challenge one another, and build a professional community committed to improving justice. That spirit was on full display at the 2026 New Mexico Pretrial Executive Network (NM PEN) Summit, held June 23–24, where pretrial leaders from across New Mexico and around the country gathered for two days of collaboration, leadership development, and innovation. A Network Built on Community The New Mexico Pretrial Executive Network was established in 2020 by Kelly Bradford, Director of the New Mexico Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), with a vision of creating for New Mexico what the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) Pretrial Executive Network had long provided nationally—a trusted community where pretrial leaders could connect, learn, solve problems together, and support one another through the complex work of system change. The NIC Pretrial Executive Network, championed for many years by Lori Eville, demonstrated the value of executive-level collaboration. Lori understood that pretrial leadership requires more than technical expertise. It requires navigating adaptive challenges, leading organizational change, and continuously moving systems forward. Just as importantly, she recognized that the work can sometimes feel isolating. For many of us, the NIC PEN became far more than a professional network. It became a place to test ideas, seek advice, celebrate successes, and rely on colleagues who truly understood the unique challenges of pretrial leadership. Nearly all of the national speakers and facilitators who have participated in NM PEN over the years are current or former members of the NIC PEN. They appreciate the importance of maintaining a professional community created by—and for—pretrial practitioners. When New Mexico began implementing statewide pretrial reforms, leaders recognized that lasting success would require more than policy changes. It would require an ongoing investment in the people responsible for implementing those reforms every day. Today, that vision has become reality. NM PEN has grown into a vibrant statewide community representing all 13 Judicial Districts, Administrative Office of the Courts Pretrial Management, and justice system partners who meet monthly to share ideas, address emerging challenges, and strengthen evidence-based practice across New Mexico. Continuing the Work Through the Annual Summit The annual NM PEN Summit extends those monthly conversations by providing dedicated time for strategic planning, leadership development, and peer learning. This year's summit welcomed 27 pretrial executives and justice system partners from New Mexico, Arizona, Indiana, Washington, D.C., and Maine, along with representatives from the Center for Effective Public Policy. The summit also reflected the strong partnership between state and national leadership. Among those participating were NAPSA Board members Domingo Corona, Hillary Hartoin, and Mike Kainu, as well as Tanya Anderson, APPR, Elizabeth Simoni, Kelly Bradford, Gilbert Jaramillo, and pretrial leaders representing every New Mexico judicial district. Justice Vigil also joined the summit to recognize the remarkable progress New Mexico has made over the past several years. Having witnessed many of the state's early conversations surrounding pretrial reform, he reflected on how those once-ambitious ideas have grown into meaningful statewide improvements supported by a dedicated community of practitioners. Leadership Beyond Management Throughout the summit, participants explored topics essential to modern pretrial leadership, including organizational culture, motivational interviewing as a leadership tool, stakeholder engagement, evidence-based decision-making, and using data to improve both supervision practices and system outcomes. Sessions emphasized that effective leadership extends well beyond managing operations. It requires building healthy organizational culture, investing in staff, fostering innovation, and creating environments where evidence-based practices can thrive. Rather than focusing solely on presentations, the summit encouraged discussion among peers facing similar challenges in jurisdictions across the state. Participants shared practical solutions, exchanged experiences, and explored how successful local practices might be adapted elsewhere. Celebrating Innovation Across New Mexico One of the summit's highlights was hearing directly from each judicial district about the accomplishments, innovations, and progress made during the past year. These presentations showcased the creativity and dedication of New Mexico's pretrial professionals while providing opportunities for agencies to learn from one another's successes. Whether implementing new programs, strengthening partnerships, improving data collection, or refining supervision practices, each district demonstrated a commitment to continuous improvement. Participants also took part in an interactive leadership exercise in which they developed and presented mock NAPSA conference workshops. The activity encouraged attendees to think beyond their local jurisdictions and consider how their experiences could contribute to the national conversation surrounding pretrial justice. The exercise reinforced an important message: every agency has knowledge worth sharing, and leadership includes helping others grow.
Pretrial supervision serves a clear mandate: ensure individuals appear in court, prevent new criminal activity, and administer justice equitably for people who are legally presumed innocent. High functioning pretrial agencies take that mandate seriously — and the evidence compels us to ask not just what we are trying to achieve, but how we can most effectively get there.
Meet the NAPSA Board: Q&A Spotlight
How recognizing trauma improves court appearance, reduces new arrests, and strengthens the justice system legitimacy