The New York City Criminal Justice Agency, Inc. (CJA) is a not-for-profit corporation serving the City's criminal justice system under contract with the Office of the Coordinator for Criminal Justice. CJA was established in 1973 (as the Pretrial Services Agency) to provide pretrial services as pioneered and tested by the Vera Institute of Justice's Manhattan Bail Project in the early 1960s. That experimental project demonstrated that defendants with strong ties to the community who are released on their own recognizance return to court as frequently as those who post bail.
