Obvious statement of the day: The criminal justice system can be really difficult to navigate. That is, if you can figure out what its various processes are in the first place—and they can sometimes be so unintelligible that a person might wonder if they’re actively designed to be confusing.

This is a particular problem in the pretrial court process. A judge decides whether a person should be released from custody while awaiting their day in court with guidance from a data-driven algorithm called a release assessment. But this crucial step of the criminal justice process is a black box: a mystery to the general public and difficult for court employees to use. So New York’s Criminal Justice Agency tapped the Brooklyn design agency Hyperakt to make a user-friendly interface that’s intended to help everyone—from lawyers to families of people who have been arrested—better understand the process.

The fact that CJA redesigned its site and associated tools isn’t completely out of left field. It’s part of a growing push to reform criminal justice in the United States, from a bipartisan criminal justice bill passed in 2018, to cash bail reform in California, New York, and New Jersey, to the election of progressive district attorneys in Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas, San Francisco, and more. At the same time, many tools that power the criminal justice system are coming under fire for perpetuating bias. CJA’s interface shows the role design can play in working toward a fairer system.

Navigating an opaque system

Consider the current pretrial process in New York City. You’ve been arrested and fingerprinted, and you’re awaiting arraignment. Before that happens, you’ll undergo a pretrial interview to determine the likelihood you’ll return for your court date, and whether or not you should be released on recognizance in the interim.

This interview is conducted by a staff member of the New York City Criminal Justice Agency (CJA) I mentioned a little earlier. It’s an independent nonprofit and quasi-governmental agency with a mission to “assist the courts and the City in reducing unnecessary pretrial detention,” according to its website. Within New York City’s criminal justice system, CJA is mostly involved in the pretrial process, and makes pretrial release recommendations based on that interview mentioned above. The scope of CJA is more broad than this process alone, however; it conducts research, offers resources to navigate the cash bail system (which was restricted under new bail reform legislation on January 1), manages a supervised release program in Queens, and notifies every person who has a pending case. According to Aubrey Fox, CJA’s executive director, the organization makes about a million pending case reminders a year.

Like many courtrooms across the country, the pretrial release recommendation is based on the results of an algorithm that calculates how likely it is that a person will return to court (although it’s just that, a recommendation, and the judge still has latitude to make his or her own ruling, says Fox). According to CJA, the release assessment has been in place for about 40 years. “But a lot of people have an issue with it because it’s a black box,” Fox says. “A computer is making the decision, but you don’t know why or how. But it has to be transparent. We want to explain to the public what went into the algorithm.”

What with the cash bail reform legislation and conversation about closing Rikers Island, Fox says that he’s seen a lot of interest in how the court operates lately. Now, “Judges have to pick the least restrictive option and cannot select money bail on most cases,” Fox says. “So anyone would know what went into the algorithm and how it was produced.” It seemed like an optimal time to push toward transparency and improve the experience of the site. That’s when the organization brought on Hyperakt.