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Idaho legislators are the first in the nation to pass transparency protections addressing concerns about risk assessment tools in the criminal justice system.

More than two months since President Donald Trump signed into law the First Step Act, the development of a risk assessment tool central to its implementation is still stalled.

Idaho is one step closer to becoming the first state to make pretrial risk assessment algorithms more transparent and open to public scrutiny, addressing long festering concerns about the risk to civil rights of automated pretrial tools in criminal justice.

The First Step Act was touted as beginning a reversal of decades of tough-on-crime policies. But just hours after the bill was signed by President Trump, the federal government began a shutdown of “nonessential” government operations. Now more than a month later, the shutdown has stopped efforts by the federal government to meet the new law’s first deadline - the selection of a team who will help implement a tool to assess risk and needs.