Establish written criteria for emergency release before the next emergency.

What produced more equitable outcomes in 2020 was capacity, not principle. During COVID-19, defense attorneys, judges, and corrections agencies used the pandemic as a justification for release, and capacity pressures produced decisions that the system would not otherwise have made. Court-based actors should translate that ad hoc practice into written criteria (e.g., health risk, time served, charge category), so that release during an emergency is systematic rather than a matter of individual discretion or of how full a facility happens to be.