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Building Capacity for Tribal Justice Solutions: A Portrait of Assessments and Technology in Tribal Courts

Decisions about what to do with people coming through the criminal court system can have long-lasting impacts on those individuals’ well-being and public safety more broadly. Will putting them in jail make things better or worse? Will offering them services help address some of the underlying issues that brought them to court in the first place? Given the complexity of these decisions, criminal justice practitioners have increasingly relied on risk assessments to help them systematically make these determinations. But assessments used in one context do not always translate well to other contexts. In particular, tribal courts—courts operated by Indian tribes under laws and procedures that the Tribe has enacted (Jones, 2000)—have found these assessments lacking and not always appropriate for their unique context and population.

Because of this, there has been a desire among tribal practitioners to develop their own risk assessment tools or ensure appropriate validation of existing tools within their tribal contexts or with tribal populations. This report summarizes the first steps that the Center for Court Innovation and the Tribal Defenders of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have taken to build knowledge and lay the groundwork for advancing risk-need assessment, data management, and technological capacity in tribal courts.

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