Reports and peer-reviewed research on the Bay Area courts and the people who interact with them.
This peer-reviewed article draws on 125 interviews and over 400 hours of ethnographic observations from the Court Listening Project to theorize how state institutions produce “spatial burdens” in marginalized people’s lives.
Summer 2025
This report describes the 2024 systems navigator pilot program and offers five recommendations for assisting clients pretrial.
January 28, 2025.
This report examines racial/ethnic disparities in arrests in Santa Clara County, California, from 1980 to 2019. Over the past forty years, felony and misdemeanor arrest rates have declined for all racial groups, but racial disparities have persisted and, in some cases, increased.
October 8, 2022.
This report describes—and offers recommendations for improving—the quality of attorney-client relationships in a criminal courthouse in Santa Clara County, California.
August 15, 2022.
This report summarizes perceptions of policing among a racially and socio-economically diverse sample of 37 people who faced criminal charges in the Hall of Justice, a courthouse in San Jose, California, between August 2021 and March 2022.
April 24, 2022.