Risk assessments—automated formulas that measure the “risk” a defendant will be rearrested or fail to appear in court—are among the most controversial issues in criminal justice reform. To proponents, they offer a corrective to potentially biased decisions made by individual judges. To opponents, far from disrupting biases, risk assessments are unintentionally amplifying them, only this time under the guise of science.Drawing on a case study of more than 175,000 defendants in New York City, ‘Beyond the Algorithm: Pretrial Reform, Risk Assessment, and Racial Fairness,’ produced with the support of Arnold Ventures, examines the impact of risk assessments on racial disparities in pretrial decisions.