Balancing freedom and security: decision-making on (non-) custodial measures in pretrial criminal investigations

At various moments within criminal proceedings, judicial authorities need to make prompt decisions about the extent to which a suspect poses a risk to society, as well as about the likelihood that the suspect will appear at future hearings. Such (quick) decisions about a suspect's liberty often need to be based on little information available. Possible outcomes are no deprivation of liberty, conditional pre-trial release, bail or pretrial detention. Thus far, such decision making has received little academic attention. Limited research available shows that such decision making is inconsistent among decision makers, rather untransparant and is vulnerable to bias, leading to underestimations and overestimations of risk and unnecessary pretrial detention decisions. There is, however, a growing body of criminological-psychological research showing that a more structured pretrial risk assessment can improve such decision making, also resulting in less (unnecessary) custodial measures being taken, which is beneficial for the suspect as well as to tackle current prison overcrowding issues. Given this pressing issue, this research will examine how such pretrial decision making occurs, if and how this decision making can be improved and the extent to which exisiting (pretrial) risk assessment tools, which have been developed and tested elsewhere (e.g. Canada), can be applied and implemented in a Belgian context. Using Belgium as a test case, the research will result in a tool, guidelines and training for informing and improving magistrates' pretrial decision- making on (non-)custodial measures. As such, the research findings will also contribute to tackling the pan-European problem of prison overcrowding issues and treatment of suspects and unsentenced detainees, while safeguarding victims' and public security needs as well.