Skip to content

OUR WORK

Pathways to Pretrial Advancement

Municipal, county, and tribal jurisdictions selected through a competitive process are engaged in an innovative 12-month strategic planning process to evaluate their current system and create an actionable plan to improve pretrial outcomes and enhance community safety and well-being.

About APPR
Six people standing and smiling.

APPR provides professional facilitation, expert coaching, immersive learning experiences, and peer support to eight jurisdictions selected through a competitive process. Sites participate in a formal strategic planning process to: 

  1. Identify critical decision points and assess policies and practices based on data, evidence, and best practices.
  2. Select practical changes that enhance fairness, public safety, and effectiveness.
  3. Develop an implementation plan that outlines roles, timelines, stakeholder engagement, and success metrics.
  4. Assess readiness for potential rigorous research by learning evaluation concepts and exploring the feasibility of research, with support from the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO).

This opportunity helps localities bring stakeholders together, prioritize the most promising improvements, and promote effective pretrial policies and practices. 

Sites Selected

FAQ

The application period for Cohort 1 is currently closed, but APPR plans to announce a future Pathways to Pretrial Advancements Request for Applications for Cohort 2 in Fall 2026. If you are not receiving APPR’s monthly newsletters, sign up. Registered users are the first to hear about RFAs, technical assistance, and training and resources available at no cost.

Use the APPR Roadmap for Pretrial Advancement by creating a pretrial policy team. The Implementation Roadmap includes helpful suggestions to convene an inclusive policy team. Then, the team can use the Policy Roadmap to educate themselves about best practices. 

Sign up with APPR to get our monthly newsletters and join the APPR Community, the largest online resource for people working to advance pretrial justice. You’ll be the first to receive newsletters with information about no-cost training and resources, technical assistance opportunities, and more. We also post updates on the APPR Community.

Contact

For more information about Pathways to Pretrial Advancement, contact APPR. 

About APPR & LEO

APPR

Advancing Pretrial Policy and Research (APPR) is a collaborative, multi-year project that promotes and facilitates advancements in pretrial justice. By supporting and engaging pretrial professionals and community members in the meaningful delivery of data-informed pretrial justice, APPR seeks to achieve fair, safe, and equitable pretrial practices that positively impact people, systems, and communities. APPR is supported by Arnold Ventures and managed by the Center for Effective Public Policy.

LEO

The Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) at the University of Notre Dame is a research center that partners with governments and nonprofits to rigorously evaluate programs that help people move out of poverty. LEO co-designs causal studies with service providers, uses administrative data to measure real-world outcomes, and helps scale approaches that prove effective. Causal research designs can reliably and validly isolate the treatment effect of a policy, practice, or intervention. Examples of such research designs include difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, instrumental variable, and randomization.