Our criminal court system is often a black box to the general public. Inside court doors, crucial, life-changing decisions are being made for defendants. Their freedom is being discussed by a handful of court actors and is often decided by a single judge within a few minutes.
This system has been set up to allow for judicial independence and for judges to rule on cases by the evidence, uninfluenced by bureaucrats or lobbying groups. But this independence can make it more challenging for the public to hold judges accountable for what happens inside a courtroom.
One solution the public has used to keep a watchful eye on the criminal court system is court watching, a type of field observation of court proceedings that has been around since the 1970s. Court watching can be done by one person or a group of people, and it can be done formally using training and forms or informally through simple observation. Though it’s often done to observe criminal court hearings, there are court watching programs focused on other courts, like family courts.
The Impact of Court Watch Programs
Court watching can have a major impact on our court system. For example, in 1973, a court watching program in Massachusetts led to a change in how judges were appointed, as the Judicial Nominating Commission was established to screen potential judicial candidates. Further, court watch organizations have used their role as watchman of the court system to collect data on injustices that can happen in the court system and are normally undocumented in other data sources. For example, a lawsuit on unlawful pretrial detention in Maryland relied heavily on data from court observations from Courtwatch PG, a court watch program in Prince George’s County.
As part of the Microsoft Catalyst Grant Program, several grantees have used Catalyst funds to improve their court watching efforts and impact their communities.
Court watching can be a tool to educate the public on elections that are easily overlooked: those of local judges. Staff at the Illinois Alliance for Reentry and Justice, formerly a part of Safer Foundation, trained Cook County residents to court watch using a free online course. Using results from hundreds of court observations, they were able to create a scorecard for each judge up for reelection in their county in 2024. The goal of this work was to encourage civic engagement in elections of judges, providing community members with useful information to inform voting decisions.
Court watching can also be used to better understand the complexity and inner workings of the criminal legal system and uncovered inequities. The Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development used Catalyst grant funding to continue its Court Observer Program and analyze the data collected through that program to explain court processes to voters. One way it did this was to help voters understand drivers of racial disparities in those processes and how those disparities would be affected by a statewide referendum on changes to the bail system. The goal of this work has been to enable voters to make informed voting decisions and give them the tools to advocate for reforms to their criminal legal system.
Another Catalyst grantee, the Freedom Community Center, has used the efforts of numerous court watching volunteers to provide oversight of bail hearings in St. Louis and publicize statistics on the state of St. Louis’s criminal legal system. With Catalyst grant support, the center collected data from more than 1,800 bail hearings. To efficiently manage the data at this scale, it used Microsoft PowerApps and Dataverse to develop a streamlined infrastructure for data entry, storage, cleanup, and analysis and used PowerBI and other data-visualization tools to develop public-facing static and interactive reports to share findings. The center used the reports to energize community members to volunteer as court watchers and provide oversight of bail hearings in St. Louis. The oversight of this court watch program also coincided with a tangible reduction in the prosecutor's office's use of "no bond" recommendations, which fell from 88 to 78 percent over several months after the court watch program was implemented.
The Catalyst Grant Program is continuing to support grantees focused on court observation in the current round of funding. More information on the nonprofit organizations funded and the focus of their work is available here.
How to Start a Court Watch Program
If you want to start court watching yourself, it’s best to have a primer on what the court process looks like in your jurisdiction. For example, CourtWatch.org created a video with information on how bail proceedings occur and the importance of court watching. Several resources on how to begin court watching are also available from successful court watch programs.
When starting off court watching, the most critical part is deciding what you want to track in your observations. Is your focus prosecutorial decisionmaking? Judicial conduct? The quality of representation? Or is the paramount focus the experiences of defendants? Answering this question ahead of time will help you identify what to track in your notes.
After you have identified your programmatic focus, you will want to identify specific questions for your court watchers to help them capture key information. Such information might concern outcomes (like bail amount), processes (like who is discussing the case), and other descriptive information like courtroom atmosphere. Several court watching forms online include questions on the topics mentioned above. For example, Pretrial Justice Institute has a first appearance observation form that asks about courtroom atmosphere, details of the case, and outcomes. There is no need to reinvent the wheel when you start court watching. Many court watching programs post their forms online or are happy to share them with similarly motivated court watchers upon request. These examples can inspire and inform the questions you select.
After identifying what information you will record, you will want to consider the technical infrastructure you will use to help your watchers and staff efficiently collect and analyze the data. Court watching often means collecting data with pen and paper, but there are also a variety of technology solutions programs are using in different phases of the process. When devices are allowed in court, digital forms can enable you to input data in real time and enable the data to be automatically uploaded and securely stored. And data systems can enable you to merge data, analyze trends across courts and over time, and visualize and share patterns and insights. Such tools can support data quality, enable watchers and organizations to collect more types of data, and help them implement and maintain healthy data-stewardship practices.
Court watch programs can be used by communities in many ways. They can be a tool to educate community members about the court process, they can be leveraged to collect and publicize data to support reform efforts, and they can spur changes at the individual level as members of the public serve as watchmen who can hold punitive court actors accountable. Administrative data on case processing are limited; there are several crucial observations that happen in court that are never documented in any case management systems or public data, and court watching presents an opportunity to capture these data. Court watching is a necessary tool the public should have. Community members have a vested interest in understanding whether their criminal legal system is fair and effective, and court watching is a way to evaluate whether this is the case and to provide accountability if it is not.
The Catalyst Grant Program is a collaboration between the Urban Institute and the Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative to help nonprofit organizations use data and technology to advance racial equity and reform in the criminal legal system. Visit the Catalyst Grant Program Insights page for more resources and stories about the grantees.