The PSA represents a growing trend of court systems around the country using computerized risk-assessment to inform bond-setting and, in some places, even sentencing decisions. Some experts are welcoming the PSA as a tool for potentially counteracting racial and class bias in judges’ bond-setting—a bias that’s seen as contributing to the    disproportionate pre-trial incarceration of poor, African-American men in the Cook     County jail. But critics are concerned that bias persists even in the PSA’s supposedly neutral algorithm. And the whole debate is potentially moot in the face of     a larger question: are Cook County judges even paying attention to the PSA’s scores?



               “People have been looking at Chicago bond court for a long time, and the concern has always been the length of hearing—that the judges are not really     looking and seeing the defendants, most importantly their social features,” says Temple University sociologist Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve. Her recent book,     Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Criminal Courts, is an expansive study of Cook County court culture based on her own experiences working in the state’s attorney’s and public defender’s offices, more than 1,000 hours of court-watching, and interviews collected with a research     team from the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice.



           Initial reports about the PSA’s effect on the bond decisions    have been conflicting. After the PSA was piloted in central bond court in the summer of 2015, the Sheriff’s Justice Institute    released a study claiming that     judges ignored the court staffers’ recommendation for pre-trial release conditions in 85 percent of the 1,574 bond hearings observed between February 10 and     March 29, 2016. Milhizer disputes the validity of these findings, saying that the sample was too small and that the PSA wasn’t fully implemented for judges to take into account before March 21. In a    statement     released Monday, Evans claims that “the use of I-bonds and electronic monitoring is climbing,” implying that the judges are taking the risk-assessment into consideration and that as a result 94 percent of defendants charged with nonviolent, non-weapons cases are now being released on recognizance bonds and house arrest. 



               Traci Schlesinger, a sociologist at DePaul University, also thinks these predictive tools are overly focused on whether a defendant will miss a court date.