The right call.
At the right time.
Intake puts a prosecutor in the conversation before a single arrest is made — stopping bad cases before they start, and strengthening the ones that matter.
The arrest decision is the most consequential moment in the justice system. Intake puts a prosecutor side by side with law enforcement to ensure that arrests result in convictions.
Most jurisdictions do not involve a prosecutor in the pre-trial process until after an arrest. Research on the U.S. pretrial system indicates that this process carries a significant cost in wasted resources, wrongful bookings, and charges that do not withstand prosecutorial review.
Intake changes the sequence by bringing prosecutorial review to the moment of arrest. Before any arrest is made, the responding officer calls a prosecutor hotline. The call averages 90 seconds. The prosecutor reviews the facts of the case inside the Intake platform — seeing only the legal elements, not the race or gender of the person involved — and returns one of four decisions: Accept, Deny, Hold, or Needs More Information.
If the case is accepted, the arrest proceeds. Charges are sent directly to the court the same day, with a complete audit trail locked at every step. If the case is denied, the officer can release the suspect — before anyone is booked unnecessarily, and before money and time is spent jailing anyone on a charge that will not ultimately be prosecuted.
Harris County, Texas has operated this model since 1977. They run the most efficient prosecution office and the highest arrest-to-prosecution rate of any of the 25 largest counties in the United States — a result attributed in part to the efficiency of pre-arrest screening. Justice Innovations has built the software to bring that model to jurisdictions across the country.
Officers arrest. Prosecutors decide if charges hold.
Officers are trained to respond to scenes — not to navigate what makes a charge legally prosecutable. Some laws are unenforceable as written. Others carry warrant requirements, affirmative defenses, or exceptions that officers may not know. A prosecutor knows all of this, in real time, before the handcuffs go on.
Without pre-arrest screening, cases get filed and dropped after the fact — but only after the person has been booked and often spends weeks in jail on a charge that will not survive prosecutorial review. The waste is measurable: 2–5 hours of officer time, 0.5–1 hour of prosecutor time, and an average of 36 nights in county custody.
Not counting: wrongful arrest lawsuits, administrative time, or tragedies avoided.
Sources: Bureau of Justice Statistics, NALP, TDCJ.
From the scene to the courthouse — every step documented.
- Log into Intake from the patrol car
- Enter the offense, subtype, incident details, and citizen information
- Submit the case — an Intake number is instantly generated
- Call the ADA hotline for the verbal review
- Review case record, charges, priors, warrants, orders of protection
- Decide: Accept, Deny, Hold, or Needs Info
- If accepted: add charges, generate case forms, file directly to the clerk
- Clerk assigns Cause Number, returns via secure channel
- Receive email notification with case and charge summary
- Confirm custody and booking linkage
- Monitor alerts and flag any discrepancies
- Booking takes minutes, not hours
- Receive encrypted PDF filing via secure channel
- Assign Cause Number
- Return Cause Number — case transitions to Filed
- Case marked Complete per local business rules
🔒 Locked files are preserved as-submitted to ensure the audit trail cannot be challenged.
Everything the process needs. Nothing it doesn't.
Cloud-based, paperless, and built by prosecutors who spent careers successfully deploying this system. Every feature exists because a real workflow demanded it.
See Intake in action.
A real case. A real decision.
Every field structured, every flag surfaced, every timestamp recorded — before a single charge is filed.
A complete operational transition.
Platform, training, legal reference materials, and operational infrastructure — delivered as a complete package. Up and running in days, not weeks.
- 24-hour Intake & Screening Facility — procedures and logistics
- Model District Attorney Manual section for 24-hr Intake & Screening Division
- Model PD General Orders reflecting new Intake & Screening Procedures
- Prosecutor Training — CLE outline (TCOLE and CLE certified)
- Police Training — TCOLE outline · 15 total days of instruction
- Grant writing assistance
- IT support that doesn't require a translator
- Compliance paperwork for police and county jail accepting prisoners
- Annotated charges and pleadings database
- Penal Code — relevant sections with annotations
- Code of Criminal Procedure — relevant sections with annotations
- Search and Seizure case law · Traffic Stop rules and case law
- Affirmative Links case law · Common Defenses, Justifications, and Exceptions
- High Bond and Blood Search Warrant Templates
- Magistrates Order for Emergency Protection templates
Outcomes that matter to the system — and the people in it.
The Cameron County pilot runs April through July 2026. Every metric below is tracked against a 10-year historical baseline, with statistical testing designed to produce grant-defensible, peer-reviewable results.
The science behind the software.
Intake is the software embodiment of a process that Harris County, Texas has been running since 1977 — with 45 years of data behind it. Every feature, every workflow decision, and every metric we track is grounded in published research and empirical evidence.
45 years of proof.
The results of over four decades in Harris County are unambiguous: when a prosecutor reviews a case before the arrest, the system produces fewer wrongful bookings, stronger cases against the guilty, better-trained officers, and dramatically lower pretrial jail populations.
Compare the Harris County “No Action” rate (charges filed and then declined to prosecute) to Miami-Dade County or New Mexico over the same period. Harris County is near zero, while counties without pre-arrest screening see it balloon to 40% or more of all charges filed.
We built Intake to make that 45-year Harris County track record replicable anywhere in the country.
A “No Action” case is one filed with the court but ultimately declined to prosecute — an arrest and booking that resulted in nothing.
Data: GTX weekly data, jurisdictional comparison studies. Source documents available on request.
What jurisdictions without Intake are paying for.
Not counting: wrongful arrest lawsuits, indigent defense, administrative time, or averted tragedies.
Sources: Bureau of Justice Statistics, NALP, TDCJ.
Harris County has run prosecutor-guided intake since 1977. Miami-Dade has not. By 2008, the cost of that difference — measured only in salary waste from dropped cases — had grown to over $20 million per year in Miami-Dade. Harris County's comparable figure remains near zero.
The science.
Every feature in Intake is grounded in peer-reviewed research. The studies below are conducted by the Center for Science and Law (SciLaw), our 501(c)3 research partner.
View All SciLaw Publications →The Intake Platform is engineered for prosecutors, law enforcement, clerks, and jail staff operating in CJIS- and FedRAMP-governed environments. This white paper details the platform’s technical, operational, and governance controls — covering zero-trust architecture, AES-256 encryption, immutable audit logs, AWS GovCloud hosting, role-based access control, and full alignment to CJIS Security Policy Sections 5.4–5.13 and FedRAMP-Ready Infrastructure baselines.
Download White Paper& Compliance
The same problem. Four different perspectives.
Intake serves every role in the criminal justice chain — and each has a different reason to want it. Here is what Intake means for the people who use it, fund it, and oversee it.
Stop managing cases that should never have been filed.
The office handles everything downstream of a bad arrest — paperwork, docket time, public defender coordination, and the eventual nolle prosequi filing. All of it takes time. All of it costs money. None of it should be necessary.
With Intake, the ADA hotline becomes the filter. Prosecutors engage at the moment of maximum leverage — before the arrest — rather than spending their time unwinding decisions made without them. Cases that reach the office are stronger, better documented, and ready to move.
Harris County runs the most efficient prosecution office and the highest arrest-to-prosecution rate of any of the 25 largest U.S. counties — in part because the system is efficient enough that it doesn't need more of them. That's what pre-arrest screening does at scale.
- Fewer cases to process, drop, or explain — bad arrests stopped before they start
- Cases that arrive are complete, documented, and legally defensible
- Auto-generated charging documents and pleadings — no re-keying or duplicate entry
- Direct filing to the court clerk — same-day, encrypted, and fully auditable
- Declination analytics by offense type — see what's working and what isn't
- Equity metrics built in — approval and denial rates by subgroup, tracked from day one
- Nolle prosequi rates drop — and with them, court backlog and public defender appointments
- Prosecutor training embedded in every hotline call — officers improve in real time
- Officers spend more time on patrol, less time at a desk processing bookings that get dropped
- Booking time drops from hours to minutes — Photo ID auto-population eliminates duplicate data entry
- Officers receive real-time legal training on every hotline call — charge elements, probable cause, warrant requirements
- Every arrest is prosecutor-authorized before it happens — reducing wrongful arrest exposure
- Case forms and narratives auto-populate from the structured submission — less paperwork, fewer errors
- Supervisors can review officer submission patterns and flag inconsistencies early
- TCOLE-certified training included in the implementation package — 15 days of instruction
- IT support that doesn't require a translator — straightforward onboarding, rapid deployment
Arrest with confidence. Book faster.
An officer who arrests someone on a charge the prosecutor won't touch has not helped anyone. They've wasted 2–5 hours at the station, taken a patrol car off the street, and subjected a person to an arrest that may have no legal basis.
Intake changes that dynamic. Before any arrest, the officer has a 90-second conversation with a prosecutor who knows the law. If the case holds up, the officer proceeds with confidence. If it doesn't, everyone is better off knowing that before the arrest — not weeks later.
Over time, those hotline calls become a training channel. Officers learn charge elements, warrant requirements, and probable cause standards from prosecutors in real time — improving the quality of every submission thereafter.
A less crowded docket. Fewer cases that go nowhere.
Every nolle prosequi filing, every dismissed case, every first appearance on a charge that was never prosecutable — that is docket time courts will never recover. Multiply that by the volume of a busy jurisdiction and the math becomes stark.
When the prosecutor screens cases before the arrest, the cases that reach the court are ready. The documentation is complete. The charges are defensible. Direct filing means charges go from the prosecutor to the clerk without delay — same-day, encrypted, with a Cause Number assigned and returned through a secure channel.
For judges, the impact is downstream but real: fewer first appearances on charges that evaporate, fewer public defender appointments that lead nowhere, and a pretrial population that more accurately reflects the cases that belong in the system.
- Fewer cases initiated that will ultimately be dismissed or nolle prosequied
- Direct filing — same-day court receipt, encrypted PDF, Cause Number returned via secure channel
- Cases that arrive are complete and documented — ready for first appearance
- Pretrial jail population decreases — fewer people waiting on charges that aren't moving
- Time to first appearance improves — arrest to filing happens the same day
- Reduction in public defender appointments on cases that were never going to proceed
- Full audit trail on every case — supports judicial oversight and oversight body reporting
- County-level savings calculable by jurisdiction — data and methodology available on request
- Pilot designed to produce grant-defensible, peer-reviewable results with 10-year baselines
- Full equity and accountability metrics embedded in the evaluation framework
- Grant writing assistance included in the implementation package
- RFP support available — Justice Innovations works alongside your procurement team
The numbers make the argument.
Pretrial jail populations are expensive, often inequitable, and — in many cases — entirely avoidable. The people sitting in county jails awaiting trial for charges that will eventually be dropped are costing taxpayers money every single night.
The U.S. average rate of No Action cases — arrests and bookings that result in no prosecution — runs between 25% and 45% in jurisdictions without pre-arrest screening. That represents an enormous amount of preventable spending. Intake attacks it at the source.
The Cameron County pilot is structured to produce the kind of rigorous, comparative data that moves policy: 10-year historical baselines, statistical validation, and metrics designed specifically for grant credibility and legislative review.
Built for the system — and everyone it touches.
One well-documented model: a prosecutor at the point of arrest. Justice Innovations is a Houston-based Public Benefit Corporation — mission-driven by charter, not just by intention. We build the software. Our research partner, SciLaw, provides the science. Together we are working to make every intake decision more accurate, more equitable, and more defensible.
Woman-Owned Small Business · Public Benefit Corporation · Made in Texas, Built for All States
The Center for Science and Law (SciLaw)
SciLaw is an independent 501(c)3 justice-tech nonprofit based in Houston, Texas. Where Justice Innovations builds and deploys the software, SciLaw provides the academic foundation — research in neurolaw, human decision-making, ethical data science, and criminal justice outcomes that informs every design decision we make.
The two organizations share leadership and a mission: to understand the science of how humans make decisions under pressure, and to build systems that make those decisions more accurate, more equitable, and more defensible in court.
SciLaw's research is published openly. The Cameron County pilot evaluation is designed to produce peer-reviewable data — not internal marketing metrics. When the results come in, they will be available to the field.
- Neurolaw — the neuroscience of human decision-making in legal contexts
- Ethical data science in criminal justice applications
- Pretrial population analysis and pretrial reform evaluation
- Equity and accountability frameworks for prosecutorial decision-making
- Policy analysis for reoffender reduction and public safety outcomes
- Behavioral research on officer and prosecutor decision patterns
Cameron County, Texas
April through July 2026.
The Cameron County pilot is Intake's first deployment — structured as a rigorously designed evaluation with historical baselines, statistical testing plans, and metrics designed for grant oversight and peer review.
Cameron County currently has 1,093 people in jail, 851 of whom are awaiting trial. Based on U.S. averages, a 25% reduction in the pretrial population — the documented result of pre-arrest screening adoption — would mean 212 people released and an estimated $4,659,225 in annual savings for the county.
The pilot covers DUI and Domestic Violence cases — two of the highest-volume, highest-stakes offense types in any jurisdiction. It involves three agencies and is designed to generate the kind of data that can support expansion to other counties and other states.
Ready to see Intake in your jurisdiction?
Structured pilots with clear goals, measurable outcomes, and full transparency. No black-box implementations. No surprises.