Successful Pretrial Strategies in Rural Communities: Small-Town Solutions to Solve Big-Time Problems

Kristina Bryant: Welcome everyone. You are joining us today for a webinar, titled Successful Pretrial Strategies in Rural Communities: Small Town Solutions to Solve Big Town Problems. We are very happy to have you here today. You are joining myself. I'm Kristina Bryant. I'm a visiting fellow with BJA. And I have the pleasure today of bringing to you Hannah Turner, who is the senior project manager for University of North Carolina's Criminal Justice Innovation lab, and Hilary Hart, who is the Director of Cass County, Indiana Court, and Pretrial services. They will both have an opportunity to introduce themselves in a little bit more detail. But what I would say to you about Hannah and Hilary is, these ladies are both working in rural communities. They are both working in pre trial or working with the pretrial phase of our systems and they have some information that should be relevant to you if you are living and working in a rural community. And just as a kickoff point, we want to acknowledge that over 400 people registered for the webinar, and that to me, sends a very clear signal about the demand for information that is specific to rural communities, and we certainly hope we meet your expectations today. 

What we will be working through is just a quick introduction of what OJP and BJA is just in case you are not familiar with them. We're going to spend just a few minutes bringing you into an understanding of why we are focused on rural, why, that is important. And then we have these 2 case studies that we want to share. So first, st we're going to hear from Hannah at Unc. Have an open question and answer period as Hannah at the end of Hannah speaking, and then we'll hear from Hilary and have a question and answer session with her as well. You will see, as you have joined us, that the chat is present. But the chat is actually one way that allows us to send information to you. It's actually the question and answer feature where you will submit questions and at the end of each of their speaking parts, we'll stop and review those and present to each of them questions that seem to get everybody's attention again. We appreciate your time today and are ready to start really from that place of making sure you understand who OJP is and and where why we are here today.

So the office of justice programs primarily provides that grant funding training, research, and statistics to our criminal justice community. They are one of 3 grant-making components that are part of the Department of Justice, which is our parent agency. The Doj additionally has the office of violence against women and the office of community oriented policing services looking on the right, you see the agencies associated with Ojp and the ones that are in our criminal justice field that we tend to be most familiar with are BJA that Grant make making organization. Bjs, who does a lot of statistics, the Bureau of Justice statistics. They often provide us statistics around jail prisons, probation pretrial, that are useful to us, and understanding from a national and state level what's going on? And then you have the National Institute of Justice that does a great deal of research. 

Specifically, BJA's mission is to provide leadership and services in grant administration and criminal justice policy development to support state, local and tribal justice strategies to achieve safer communities. And we do that under the direction of Carlton Moore, who is our director. How do we do that? We do that by investing in communities through the grants that you often associate with BJA. We do that in sharing knowledge across our systems and through engagement we want to convene. We want to connect. We want individuals to have an opportunity to consult experts.

We have this quick poll for you. We this would be helpful to us to have an understanding. If you are coming from a community that is under 50,000, over 50,000, maybe you identify more as a frontier, rural community or other. Maybe none of those are representative of you. While that polls going on, I want to share with you. What a visiting fellow does cause. This may be of interest to you in the future. So visiting fellows is some is a grants opportunity that BJA has out every year and particularly it comes out in focused areas in the year I applied Pretrial was one of those areas. It gives you an opportunity as a fellow to be present and a part of a decision making body at that policy level, and it gives them an opportunity to bring practitioners into the federal system and gives them a little bit better understanding of what's going on from our practitioner perspective. 

Thank you for engaging our poll. It looks like 39% of our pre, our participants today identify with being under less than 50,000 in population, 30% at that, more, 2% at frontier. And then 29%. We did not capture the right definition for you, which is fine. Again, we are glad you're here.

So let's just talk about role. Why is rural important. Why are we setting aside time to talk about role? And it is because we believe from a strength-based approach that rural communities have something to offer our systems and our criminal justice systems that seems a little different. Our relationships across our community members and our justice systems personnel tend to be stronger. We are more aware of each other. We interact on not just a professional level, but also a social level. More regularly. There is power and strength in our professional networks in a rural communities, because of those stronger or those closer, inner relationships that we have we are much more self-reliant and that is a strongly held value among us as community members. 

But with that we do kind of recognize family systems. We honor those we are neighborly to each other, and that means that some of our sources of support can be stronger 
Kristina Bryant: when we come together as a system and we identify stakeholders. Faith-based communities. Faith-based organizations are typically at the table, which stands again to be a little bit different in a rural community. It is not abnormal for our faith-based organizations to be some of the fabric of what's providing social supports in our community. And again, that's a strength. 

And then, lastly, there seems to be a strong sense of civic duty and patriotism in our rural communities, that we can work from some statistics that I hope continue to have you sit a little straighter and a little prouder of working or living in rural is that 97% of our America's land mass is classified as rural rural people are the stewards of our food, our energy, our water, our life, essential resources. One in 5 people in our country live in rural one in 4, are persons of color, and those persons of color are stabilizing or even growing. Our rural populations in many places in the United States rural areas have higher rates of entrepreneurship. And actually, we have a 5 year survival rate of entrepreneur that is much higher than our urban counterparts. Rural locales are primary home for manufacturing energy, agriculture, forestry. These different sectors typically drive wealth and are the foundation of our economy. Nearly one in 4 of our veterans returned from active military careers to reside in our rural communities, and more than one in 4 Americans say that they would prefer to live in a rural community, and I think we saw some of that movement through COVID. 

So why, from a justice perspective, are we homing in, particularly in this pretrial area? I think most of us who are attending today have certainly heard the statistics that if you look at our jail populations, almost 70% of those populations tend to be pre-trial. But if you dig a little deeper, and you break apart. Those jail populations by size of community. 

Our rural jails tend to have a increasing population where our urban jails tend to have a lower, and so that flows 1st bullet there, says jail populations have grown by 2527 in rural counties and 7% in our small and mid-sized metropolitan areas. In contrast, our large urban counties counties, they've declined by 18%. We're not suggesting the cause and effect here, but certainly this is something that should peak our curiosity, and we should start looking at the reasons behind this and what that means for our rural communities. 

The second bullet in 2,019 rural county jail incarceration rates were more than double those of Urban county. Again, the impacts of those, as you know, from a pre-child perspective are massive. They have longer term impacts on the individual as well as the community. So that is why we are here today and interested in talking about role in our pre-trial systems. 

So it is time to turn it over. For our 1st case study. Hannah. I would love to see you turn your camera on. Welcome yourself or introduce yourself, and then please start sharing. 

Hannah Turner: Yes, so my name is Hannah Turner. I am the senior project manager at the Unc. School of Government Criminal justice, innovation lab, and I'll say a little bit more about what the lab does in a second. But what I personally do is I manage sort of the day to day on a variety of different research projects in the criminal justice space, including a lot of past and current work in rural jurisdictions. And before this I was a social worker. So I worked with lots of different folks who are involved in the criminal justice system in one way or another in my past social work career. But today I'm going to talk a little bit about the use of jail data in rural pre trial policy making. So I'll walk you all through an example of a project that we did where we partnered with a rural jurisdiction in North Carolina, and did a jail data analysis for them, and the outcomes of that analysis.

But 1st I will say a little bit more about the criminal justice innovation lab for those of you who may not be familiar. So the lab seeks to promote a fair and effective criminal justice system, economic prosperity and public safety through an evidence based approach to criminal justice policy. We are a nonpartisan non advocacy organization. Really, one of our main focuses is to be responsive to the needs of stakeholders, particularly our stakeholders. Here in North Carolina. We do focus on front end criminal justice issues. Which means that we do a lot of work in the pre-trial space and also a lot of work in topics like policing and indigent defense and other areas. But generally our work takes 3 forms.

The 1st is foundational research, where we provide information to help people understand things like best practices or relevant legal rules to help guide policy. The second is pilot projects where we work with jurisdictions to develop and implement solutions to issues that they have identified in their communities. And then the 3rd is model tools where we can take all of this information from research from these pilot projects and create off the shelf resources that can be adapted for jurisdictions all over North Carolina and jurisdictions all across the country. 

So that's a little bit about us. And of course, being based in North Carolina, we do a lot of work with rural communities. And the example that I'm gonna focus on today kind of falls into this pilot project category. 

But first, I'll sort of talk generally about the use of jail data in rural communities and something that we have come across in a lot of our work which is that stakeholders and rural areas often don't have enough reliable information about their jail jail population over time to use it in the policy making process. 

So jail data is a really important source of information. Like, we were just talking about many of the people who are in jail are being held pre-trial. It can give you a really good snapshot of things that are going on in your pre-trial system. And sometimes when we talk to folks initially, they say, Oh, well, I've got plenty of information about my jail, because I get a daily population report from my sheriff's office, or I can go online, and I'm able to see who is in the jail at any given time. And that's really helpful for day to day work as a pretrial practitioner, as a judge, whatever it may be. But when you're looking to make policy decisions, or when you're looking to maybe identify areas for improvement. You probably don't want to make those decisions based on a day or a week or even a month of your jail data. You likely are going to be interested in looking at years of information, to really see trends over time to see patterns, to see the difference between a 1 off situation that happened for a few months versus something that's coming back year after year. And so that's where this overtime piece really comes in is that we found that a lot of folks just don't have access to those years and years of data that can be the most helpful when you're trying to make policy decisions. 

But while I say that that's something that we've encountered, I don't want to make assumptions about folks here today. So we do have another poll question for you. And that's asking about how much information you have access to about your jurisdiction's jail population. Is it that daily population report that I just described, or you know, maybe you get something from the sheriff every day about who's in the jail. Maybe you get quarterly or semi-annual actual reports that show cumulative trends in the jail population like paper reports. 

Sometimes folks have dashboards or other reporting software that can show you in real time different trends about your population, or maybe it's none of the above or or other. So I'll give you just a few seconds to answer that poll and then we'll see what we've got. 

Alright. So what we're seeing here is 52 of y'all said that you have that daily population report access that I was talking about. We do have about 10 in both regular reporting and dashboards, where you maybe do get that regularly updated information, and then we have the remaining 21 in none of the above or other. So yeah, it seems like many of you are in a similar situation as our partners in Columbus County, North Carolina were. So let me tell you a little bit more about them. 

We started working with Columbus County in 2021, you see, on this map where Columbus County is. It's where that purple star is right down on the border with South Carolina. 
Hannah Turner: and we started working with them as part of the North Carolina Rural Jail Project. And so this was actually an opportunity where we put out a call for applications and invited rural jurisdictions to apply. We said, Hey, we'll do a jail data analysis for a county that's interested in learning more about their pre-trial system. And it was through the application process that we were able to learn a little more about the communities and a little bit more about what they were interested to learn about. And in Columbus County they had a very specific concern. Some of their stakeholders had a gut feeling which is so often how these kind of changes start is that somebody has a gut feeling that something is going on or something's not happening effectively. And then it all goes from there. So there was a gut feeling, particularly among their elected district attorney that they were incarcerating a fair number of people on really low, level offenses, that those people were getting booked into the jail. They were getting really low bonds because they were low, level offenses, so they would pay those bonds, and they would be right back out very quickly. 

And their concern they call this sort of churn in the jail population right? A lot of turnover folks coming in and folks coming right back out. And the concern was, you know, in a very rural and under resourced community. Their concern is about using resources effectively, and they didn't feel like this was an effective use of the jail to have people, you know, coming in coming right back out when there maybe wasn't necessarily a risk to public safety. And they were using a lot of resources. It takes a lot of time and resources to book somebody into the jail, especially if they're not going to stay for very long. 

So this was their gut feeling but they didn't necessarily have the data to back it up. And I'll tell you a little bit more about Columbus County just for context. So about 50,000 people live in Columbus County, North Carolina, about 21 of those folks are living in poverty, which is about 10 points higher than the average in North Carolina and then, like many rural jurisdictions, even though the population isn't very large, the landmass of the county is very large, so there are 100 counties in North Carolina, and Columbus County is the 3rd largest overall, so the population is very dispersed. 

So, like I said, we partnered with them. We knew what their primary concern was, and what we did with Columbus County, and what we do really with all our partners is. We started by asking some questions about what they were really interested to learn in their jail data. And I'm going to walk through some of those questions with you all today, both to share what happened in Columbus, but also maybe to give you some ideas of how you might use this type of information in your jurisdiction. So the 1st question, and maybe the most simple, is, what am I interested in learning from jail data? It can be really helpful before you start going down the road of trying to pull data and trying to analyze data, to really think for a second about what you're wanting to learn. Is there a specific issue like in Columbus. They already had something in mind. Or maybe it's just wanting to learn more about the jail population generally in Columbus. What they were interested to learn really boiled down to some pretty basic information. They wanted to know who was in the jail in terms of things like demographics. They wanted to know why they were there, so what they were charged with and then they wanted to know how long they were staying and even though that is relatively simple basic booking information. Like many of you, they've never seen this information over time before and we found that this kind of information about the jail population can really lay the groundwork for lots of different conversations about policy solutions. So that's where we started is the question of what am I interested in learning from the jail. 

The next question here is, what information will I need to answer my questions? So this is really getting at what information is already available from your jail. What we've also found is that you hear the word data analysis. I already said up Front. I was a social worker. I certainly didn't think that I would have a job that had anything to do with data analysis that seemed way out of my wheelhouse. But what we found is that a lot of times you don't need complex information to be able to do really strong data analysis about your jail population. What we pull is usually basic booking information that pretty much any sheriff's office and any jail is going to keep track of. We're pulling things like when somebody was booked. Why they were booked in terms of like the charge, description, or the statute number when they were released if they were pretrial, or if they were sentenced and why they were released in terms of did they pay a bond? Or or you know, where their conditions have released changed things like that. So we're really talking basic booking information. 

And we've been able to pull that in many jurisdictions. Really, in some ways, starting with a lot of this work in Columbus, and it found that basic booking information can answer a lot of questions. But I do wanna be upfront that it cannot answer all of your questions potentially. So this part B is really are. Is the jail already collecting the information I need? If not, what do they need to collect? This is really where the strength of a smaller and a rural community can come in handy, because, you know, you know your sheriff. You know the other stakeholders in your jurisdiction, and when it comes down to it, jail data, at least. Typically, you know, of course, our experience coming from North Carolina, these are locally controlled data sets. You don't have to go to the State Capitol email, somebody that you've never met before. Try to pull a data set that you hope you'll get many months from now you can work directly with folks in your community to say, Hey, what are you guys collecting over there at the jail? How are you collecting the information? And would it be able to answer the questions that we have? One example of? Maybe a question that your jail data couldn't answer right away is, for example, a lot of times folks are interested in the proportion of people in their jail who might have mental health or substance use needs. nd in all likelihood that's not going to be in the kind of basic booking information that we often pull for jail data projects that might be protected health information. It might belong to a private vendor if your jail contracts with somebody else for health services. So you see now that there are kind of layers to how complex the the data request might be. And so you do need to think ahead of time to make sure that your jail really has access that information. 

But there are also situations where maybe the jail isn't collecting the data you need right now, or maybe they're not collecting it reliably. But they could if you had a conversation about it. I think one of the best examples here could be, you know. Let's say that you're interested in knowing the proportion of people coming into your jail who are unhoused right? Pretty much. Every jail has an address field where they're trying to type in people's home addresses when they're being booked in. So let's say, though, that right now your jails never really thought about that before, and every deputy is entering information differently when somebody comes in and says that they don't have a place to stay. Maybe one deputy is typing in homeless in the address bar. Maybe another deputy would be typing in the address of a shelter. 

Maybe another deputy would be typing in. Oh, well, just give me your parents address. Just give me an address that I can put in the system right? So everybody's entering the information differently. And if you tried to pull that, you wouldn't get a good sense of who in your jail is actually unhoused. 

But through a conversation with your sheriff and with your local stakeholders, if it's like this is an area that we're all interested in. Maybe we can ask that the deputies all put this in in the same way. Maybe we can ask that everybody types in homeless in the address field if somebody comes in and says that they don't have a permanent home and so then, later on, you will be able to pull consistent information about this issue. If it's something that's important to your community, so all hope is not lost. If right, this second, the jail is not, you know, meeting your needs in terms of the information that's really important to your jurisdiction. There are conversations that can happen that can potentially help things move in the right direction if there's an area that you really want to learn more about. But in Columbus we were lucky their questions really could be answered by some of the jail data that we're used to pulling just basic booking information. 

This last question that I'll talk about a little bit is this idea of will. I need a partner to help analyze the jail data. So in Columbus, of course, the answer was, yes, that's why they apply to the the project that we were doing is because they did need some help analyzing the jail data. And of course, that's common across rural jurisdictions. You don't necessarily have a criminal justice data analyst, or somebody on staff who can do this kind of work directly in your community. So the the plug that I wanna give essentially is that there are opportunities out there especially for rural jurisdictions to partner with other agencies or other entities to do this kind of work. If it's something that's an interest to you. Of course, as somebody who works at a university, I'll say universities can be a place to start places with criminal justice departments, sociology departments. This is a really interesting area of research for a lot of academics out there, and folks might be really interested to help you on your path. The other thing that you might consider is that while your county or your jurisdiction might not have somebody who works in criminal justice data. They might have someone who works in data. Generally, one area where there's more sort of data. Analyst folks is in things like public health, like departments of public health. And someone doesn't necessarily need to know about criminal justice data. To do this type of work, they just need to be able to understand large data sets, and they need to be able to get some direction from you about exactly what you're looking for, and the language of the criminal justice system and things like that. 

But one thing that might help, if you are sort of going down this path in your jurisdiction is something that you did get as part of your reminder email right before the webinar was actually a link to a resource. It's called core jail and court data analyses for improving local pretrial systems. It'll be dropped in the chat for you all. But essentially what that is is. That's a little packet that has a generalized version of all of the core jail and court data analyses that we usually do when we are working with jurisdictions. And so this might be a helpful place to start. If you're kind of looking at that question. Number one, what am I trying to answer about? My what am I trying to learn about from my jail data or this question, if you're trying to approach a partner, and you don't really know how to explain to them. Hey, this is what we're looking for. This is something we might be interested in. This packet might be a helpful place for you to start to kind of understand the landscape of what kind of analyses that you can get out of that kind of booking information that I talked about before. Alright. So again, in this instance, we were the partner in Columbus County. We did their jail data analysis for them, and I want to tell you a little bit more about what we found. So this 1st slide is showing bookings and releases over time for the 3 years that we analyze their data. Really, the important thing to see here is that these lines are almost exactly the same. So for pretty much every month the number of people who were booked into the jail was almost the same as the number of people who were released. And this does speak to their feeling that there was a lot of turnover, a lot of churn in the jail. But that's also not necessarily surprising. Right jails by nature are places that people are coming in and coming out very frequently. But the second piece of information is something that really surprised some of our stakeholders in the group. So this is looking at bookings by highest charge for 3 years of jail data, and when we use the term highest charge, what we mean is that when we look at a booking, we're looking at the most serious offense within that booking and categorizing it from there, cause you know, you can have a booking where you have a firearms charge, but then you also have a bunch of traffic offenses, but we usually want to categorize things based on the most serious offense. So we're looking at this by highest charge, and we see that over 3 years in their jail. 34% of bookings were for highest charge felony offenses then 40% were for highest charge misdemeanor offenses. When you add up the non-traffic misdemeanors which are that that gold color, that 29 and the orange, the traffic misdemeanors, 11% of the bookings into their jail were solely for traffic misdemeanors, the highest charge with a traffic misdemeanor. 

And then, finally, maybe something that they didn't expect that we found when we did this analysis for them was the 25% of bookings, the quarter of all bookings into their jail over 3 years that were solely for failure to appear. So these aren't even instances where somebody, let's say, gets picked up on a new charge. And they happen to realize, okay, this person has an old failure to appear, you know, and they get booked for that as well. These are instances where the only booking, the only charge in that booking was for failure to appear and this, of course, is something that might resonate with many of you in rural jurisdictions. The issue they have in Columbus County, like, I said previously very large geographically one courthouse somewhere in the middle of the county, no public transportation. And so they have a significant issue with people missing court. And then that reflects in the jail population because people are arrested and are booked into the jail for that issue. So this is just another sort of brief overview that when we looked at the data, we found that 40% of pretrial bookings were for those misdemeanors. Over 70% of people booked on non-traffic misdemeanors were released within a day and over 80% of people booked on traffic misdemeanors were released within a day. And so really, what all of this means is that they were right. They were right when they had this initial gut, feeling that they were booking in a fair number of people on really low level charges, and that those people were getting out very quickly, and that that was using a lot of resources in their community. So they were right. We had some data to back that up. But the real question now for them is, what do you do about it? Once you have this information, so I want to tell you a little bit about the policy change that they made in Columbus County, which is that they implemented a structured decision-making process for magistrates. And this was actually a form. And that's another thing that you all had access to was actually a copy of the form that they created in Columbus County. So feel free to sort of pull that up and look at it as I'm talking about it. But essentially, I'll start with the fact, because I know the word magistrate means very different things in jurisdiction. So in North Carolina. 
Hannah Turner: when you're arrested, the 1st person you go before is the magistrate, and in most cases that's the person who's determining your initial conditions of release. 
Hannah Turner: So magistrates in North Carolina are governed by State laws. They're governed by local policies. But there's a lot of discretion. And certainly in Columbus County there wasn't a particular process that magistrates had to follow that helped sort of create consistency in these decisions about conditions of release. And so they created this form that created a step-by-step process for deciding conditions of release. and it provides recommendations without removing discretion. So they didn't put in their policy. Okay, you have to do whatever the form says. Instead, magistrates are still allowed to deviate from the recommendation. They just have to document it. And that's actually another really important piece is that this form now is a way to document decision making for future reference, because before a magistrate could make a decision in the middle of the night about why somebody was going to be staying in the jail or not, and the next morning the judge might look at it, and have no idea why that decision was made. So now the Forum provides this extra layer of clarity and this extra layer of communication between the judges and other staff about why certain decisions were made. I'll go a little bit more into kind of how the form works so essentially what the form asks magistrates to consider is the offense class. So not just if it's a misdemeanor or felony, but also the class within misdemeanor or felony. Then there's a long list of case specific factors that the magistrate is asked to consider. This is a list of factors that the stakeholders came up with in Columbus County. They came up with them specifically to meet the needs of that community. You know there are things on that list like, does the person live out of state, because, like I said, this is a border county with South Carolina, so they do have a lot of folks that are not from North Carolina in their jail. There are also things like, did this offense evolve violence? Does this person have a history of failure to appear? Were they currently on pre trial release just a long list of factors that the magistrates consider. Then there's another step that asked them to consider the relevant State law in North Carolina about imposing secured bonds, and then at the end it comes up with the recommendation based on what you've checked in a bunch of different check boxes and the recommendation is going to be one of 2 things. Either the recommendation is going to be to release the person on an unsecured bond a written promise which you might call a release on your own reconnaissance in your jurisdiction. So, or a custody release. Basically, these are the 3 options in North Carolina that do not do not require somebody to pay upfront to be released from the jail. Right? So that's going to be the 1st recommendation. The second recommendation that the form might give is to impose a secured bond, so the person would have to pay to pay to be released from the jail, or they would have to have a bondsman or someone else pay that bond amount. So those are the 2 recommendations that the form might give. Again, there is also the opportunity to deviate if the recommendation is not something that the magistrate feels comfortable with. But those are basically the 2 categories. And here's how they really tailored this form and this policy to address the issue that they saw in the jail. What they decided to do is if the offense class. That very 1st step was a class 2 or class 3. Misdemeanor which in North Carolina are the least serious misdemeanors. If it was a class 2 or class 3. The presumption was that that person was going to be released on a written promise, custody, release, or unsecured bonds. So these options that don't involve money upfront. They don't even have to go through these other steps of case specific factors or the State law about secured bonds. If it's a class 2 or Class 3 went straight to the recommendation of doing some kind of non financial option for the release. And so that really, you see, sort of the through line there from A to Ca. Was that they had this feeling that they were cycling a lot of people through the J on low level offenses. They got the data to back that up in part B, and then in part C, they made a policy change that specifically targeted these lower level offenses and diverting them so that they were not booked into the jail in the 1st place. And so it's a really clear delineation between what they were able to see in the data and the policy change that they made in their community. And they've actually been using this process in this form for just about a year, and they've been very happy with it. They actually, Columbus County is part of a 3 county judicial district. So they have a couple of cut counties around them, where they share the same judges and the same DAs and things like that. And within just a couple of months of starting this in Columbus County. They expanded it to the other 2 counties. And one of those counties is even smaller. It's even more rural than Columbus so they've been. They've been really happy with the process, and it's working well for them. 

But the last sort of question that I'll plug here is this question is my policy working as expected? So when you put in this upfront you know investment in analyzing and talking about your jail data one of the other really valuable things you can do is go back on the back end, run the data again, and see if the changes that you expected are actually happening. So in Columbus County, the change they would expect is that now they're seeing fewer class twos and class threes being booked into the jail, those class 2 and class 3 misdemeanors. 

We haven't gone back yet in Columbus County and run that analysis, but it's certainly something that I would encourage jurisdictions that do this type of work to go ahead and do on the back end. If you've already done it the 1st time on the front end, it's going to be way easier to run that analysis again. And it's essentially always good to check and to see if that policy change you made really addressed that issue that you were concerned about. Or maybe it didn't. Maybe you're not seeing the change that you expected, and then it might be time to revisit. But that is a little bit about Columbus County, about their jail, data analysis about what they did. And I'm happy to answer any questions that anyone might have. 

Kristina Bryant: Hannah. Thank you. So the moment we don't have any questions. But while we wait to see if any would like to enter any what's I have a question for you. What recommendations do you have for someone who's listening today? Who would like to approach a university you mentioned around the departments and the likely skills you're looking for. But how do you cold call a university. 

Hannah Turner: Yeah, I would say, you might have varied luck in terms of who might respond to kind of a cold outreach, and who might not so. You might want to try more than one place. Honestly, if you don't get somebody who's responsive right away. But I do think one of the most valuable things, is being able to provide a little information about what you want as opposed to just saying, like, you know, hey, I I work for this jurisdiction. We're interested in a jail data analysis being a little bit more specific about even things like we're looking to do an analysis that relates to our pretrial jail population. We're interested to look over time and learn about demographics or learn about charges. Those kind of details will help somebody think about. Okay, do we have the right skills to do this? Is this something that we'd be interested to do? So? I do think that you know those kind of details, which is why, sitting down probably 1st with other stakeholders in your jurisdiction and talking about what your primary areas of interest might be. It might be worth doing that before you even go down the road of trying to outreach to somebody else. Me. 

Kristina Bryant: Thank you. We still don't have any questions. So I'm gonna lean towards that. Your presentation was so comprehensive that there was no need to follow up at the moment. We probably will have time again at the end to come back to you, if that's what we should do. So I am going to transition from Hannah to Hilary, and where Hannah brought the a case, study and experience in a community that had no pretrial services agency but still wanted to look at their pre-trial data. Hilary is going to share with us for her community's experience as the director of the Pre-trial Services Agency. So, Hilary I invite you to unmute. Turn your camera on, and share your story. 

Hillary Hartoin: Afternoon. Everyone. I'll start by briefly introducing myself. My name is Hilary Bartoy, and I'm the Cass County Court and pre-trial Services director, and that's kind of the unique title and position that we have here, which means, not only do I facilitate and oversee the pre-trial release program, but I also import services and the chair of our Jac. Or Justice Reinvestment Advisory Council for some of you. That may be your port coordinating council. So, as Hannah brought together the importance and highlighted the importance of having a data driven team. And having these discussions and answering those questions. That's a big part of my job is bringing our stakeholders together, helping us analyze the data and continue to review it and answer the questions that are important to us as a rural community to give you a little bit of a background. If I had to sum us up in 2 words, this Cass County, it would be that we're data driven. And we're client center. And that's really the main focus and mission and vision of what pre-trial services is evolved to be. Here in Cass County, but it didn't always start out that way. 

We're a small rural community of about 38,000 people in Northern Indiana, and we started out as a county that was struggling with a jail overcrowding program. And that's really why pre-crow services 1st was implemented. Here was, how do we solve our jail overcrowding program and prevent us from investing resources and burdening other jails because we were so overcrowded that we were housing 20 to 30 of our population, and other surrounding communities. And that was not only in incurring us a cost and daily per diem, but in transportation. Hearings were being delayed. It was a a big need for us. At that same time it was kind of the perfect chemistry with what was going on with our legislators. So we had the Supreme Court initiative in Indiana with criminal Rule 26. We are evidence based decision making State with the National Institute of Corrections, and with that came technical assistance with pre-trial services. So we decided to take a chance. And implement that and see if that would be a way to leverage our rural resources and solve the problem or question that we had at hand. Our pre-trial services program was started in 2,018, and at 1st it was very small, with a limited target population of who we could touch or release under our supervision fast forward through 22, 2,022 or 2022. We were the 1st certified pretrial agents the 11th pre-trial the 11th County, to receive certification from the Indiana Office support services. What that means is that we kind of pass the test with Indiana of implementing the essential elements that are outlined by Nick. Another timeline or progression that you'll see, and I'll teach you how we did that. Using the jail data that Hannah talked about is we separated out from adult probation. So we originally so small that we were part of adult probation and became the second independent pretrial agency in 2021. And how we did that is, we leveraged our data, especially our J data and our outcome data to quantify our fiscal impact and our positive intent outcomes to gain local funding and support. 

Just last year we continue to show sustain growth, as I'll show you. And then we expanded to 3 full-time case management employees, including myself. We have a dedicated public defender on staff as well as the support of services and therapeutic staff that works with us in partnership with our behavioral health provider. And that's really important to us as we being client-centric and employing that intentional supervision model to kind of give you a look at our positive outcomes, and how we present that data and give you a taste of what I will talk about today. We have many metrics that we do as part of our State initiative. We have 19 metrics that those in Indiana have to measure and look at for free trial. But here you'll see that the green columns are those that are on active pre trial supervision, and are released under our care, and you'll see how much more of an impact and success that we're able to make with our intentional model compared to that darker, maybe blue which is those who are released on financial conditions alone. So in Indiana we still do have cash fail. But you'll see there, there's an average of a 20 more success rate. With this data, driven client, etc, approach that we have in Cass County. 

Did we solve our problem? With the jail? What we originally set out to do so before pretrial services. We did. What Hannah 1st described is, we really did a deep dive, baseline analysis of our local jail and went in there and define different sectors from looking at community supervision violators to failures to appear to those who were truly held with pre-trial and economic barriers, where there's sole means of not being able to be released, and what we found is back in 2,01870 of our jail population was pre-adjudication. And we had an average population that was 2 34, which was about 20 over capacity for our small rural jail. If you fast forward that and compare that to April 2024, the pre-adjudication population and is less than 10% and our average population is 1, 25 and we actually house about 20 of our total jail population. We now help out other neighboring counties and house from them, or Doc, we have a therapeutic pod in our jail, and that allows us to retain people longer so they can participate in services while they're incarcerated. But you'll see that's an 80 reduction in our pretrial local jail population, which I think is huge for rural county. That's certainly not the norm, and what we see, but it shows the value in us looking at our data, and working together as a highly functioning team. Is, Chris had mentioned earlier. That is our greatest strength, and we've leveraged that as we move forward. 
Hillary Hartoin: And you may ask me. But, Hillary, how did you achieve that success in such a short period of time. And it is because of the data. So what I want to talk about is how I've illustrated my impact with the data. I've engaged my stakeholders. And I've secured that local support using my data. 

So what I've done is I prioritize education and using that data to encourage engagement. So I engage regularly with my stakeholders. I have a highly functioning team, and I think if I could give you one piece of advice is to recognize the role is really unique and different, and that our strength is that we really have a more intimate team. We're small town communities, everybody knows each other, and that's not a barrier that's a strength. We all know who we are. It's easier for us to come to the table to be more vulnerable and to express our concerns when we answer these questions about expanding our target population. How do we address the needs of this sector in the jail? How do we promote public safety and ensure that. So we can maybe expand into a different area when we never thought about before, and to really foster those education opportunities and develop an appetite for data with my stakeholders. And I think that's 1 of the things we really need to highlight. Here is, you have to teach your stakeholders how to engage in data and what it means to them personally and help them feel comfortable with that and asking questions. So I wanted to develop a means where I could communicate consistent data that was relative to each sector of my stakeholder group, which includes my judges, my prosecutors, my public defenders, law enforcement, my channel staff, and I wanted it to be digestible to them and also interactive. And what you'll see here. I'll have them drop it in the chat. And you're welcome to click on. My website is actually here on the right is an animated dashboard. And we update this every month. It's very good top level data. But my stakeholders, including my public community, I'm very transparent with my data. They can go in and just see our top 6 key metrics. 

Most of you are familiar with the appearance and safety rate at any time to see how what they're doing. So the data is accessible. To them at any time. We also, I'll show you on this next slide, coming up developed a newsletter that we send out to our stakeholders every month. So it's a consistent means of providing them with the information so that they can hear from us on a regular basis. They can ask us questions, they get used to who they are. They know our faces. So we're really don't have desk jobs. We're out there, not only in the community with our clients but also with our stakeholders and our funders. And what that's done is it develop an appetite for a data and a total cultural shift that focuses on evidence-based and data driven decision making not just in the decisions and the recommendations that I make in court, but also on our policy decisions, and that spread not only from pre-trial to the post conviction side. So now, for wanting to talk about expanding the pretrial population or what resources are relevant that I need to bring in to overcome. Maybe, let's say, housing barriers or behavioral health. We're going to look at the data and see what that means. And we've also seen that happen with community supervision on the post-conviction side. They now are posting performance metrics as well. So we've seen that kind of lead over and make a more system-wide impact. And that's 1 of the things that we're most proud about. Is, if you go to our website and you dig a little deeper, you'll see these metrics for community interactions and probation as well, cause. We've developed stakeholders who want that data. They're hungry for it. They want to hear from us. And they want to engage with us. That's further illustrated with this next slide. And I want to emphasize, this is a progression this document has evolved over the years. And you can actually go on the website and dig back and see all the way back to 2020 to where we are now. How our program is doing, and the different trends and how we've expanded the data points. And I wanted to have that friend analysis and that ability to do that. And Hannah illustrated. But I also want to tell our story and make it engaging. So we have these newsletters that we produce each month for our stakeholders. We also early report on it with our County Council Commissioners, who are our local funders, and we do this for our jail as well. But you'll see that we give them a nice narrative and maybe program advancements, trainings. We've attended new grants we brought in. But then we also talk about our outcomes. You know, how is our parents rate, what is our safety rate? How does that relate to what we're doing in the jail? What percentage of our clients are voluntary? Participating in the support of services and seeking the benefit of our intentional model. And by creating these tools and developing this mechanism we've been able to engage our stakeholders, and that's allowed us to see the sustained growth, because they see the evidence and the proof of what they're doing. And in return they're wanting to invest in us because they see the impact on our community. And that's illustrated, too, in our program utilization. So you'll see back in 2019 right before a COVID hit you'll see that our total population serve was 92 clients per year. I will note this is all active supervision. We really don't want to over supervise people realizing that cash bond is a thing in Indiana. So those with cash field normally are not part of us. And what we do. But you'll see that our growth has continued. So last year we were 299, and I'm gonna update 2024 from the time these slides were prepared. But we're actually at 90 of the total population we had in 2023 because we have prosecutors and public offenders. Advocating for people to be put on pretrial release in a rural community. We have an average or loosely of 89. When we have judges really maximizing release. And the program and what that's done is that's kind of charged our program up allowed us to really control our jail population to the point where we could bring in some of the needed things, such as a therapeutic pod. We can help out our other counties and generate some extra revenue. 
So the data has allowed us to do that because of the confidence we've built. 
Not only have we seen that in the support that we've seen with our program utilization. But we've seen that in the funding that we get locally. So if you think about rural communities. Most of us are really strapped for resources. And one of our biggest strengths is that we're innovative. 
So rural communities are forced by nature due to the limited nature of what we have to be innovative and maximize. Our resources, be creative with what we do. 
But despite all that, we've been able to. As you see here on the chart on the right. You've seen that over 60 of our funding is local support. 
And we are kind of unique in Indiana. I hope to see this spread throughout the State. That we only are 40 grant funded. Both of my staff and all our fringe and operational budget come from local county support. And we do that, and that we've been able to quantify our fiscal impact to the county just in the pre trial release program. This doesn't count in all the fiscal benefits that we bring into the grants or through the evidence based decision making those intangible benefits to our clients. 
But just in jail bed stays alone for 2023 is estimated that we save the county over 1.5 million dollars. 
If we just look at jail bed stays for 2023. That was over a hundred 7 years in jail bed stays that were diverted. Think about the impact of those clients in the community. Who are able to secure employment, stay home with their families and then their social support. Seek treatment. 
And that's all. With that driver. If I could tell you one data point, that is your key to securing local support or quantifying your fiscal impact is to look at your day supervised. 
So for Cass County in 2023 we had over 30,000 days supervised and we've saw 59% increase in the day supervised in 2023 for 2024. We're projecting another 50 intake, which is a little mind boggling for us. But what we do is we? Compare our operating budget to our cost savings, and that gives us a projected cost savings. Right? So I'm able to tell my County Council and Commissioners that for this much you invest in me I save you and the cost savings analysis or rate is just the total percent remaining after you subtract your annual operating costs. But by illustrating it in a way that's the data in a way that makes sense to my fiscal bodies. In my local county, I was able to gain that support, and that's actually grown over the years. Because this is a journey. Free trial is a journey. It takes a lot of endurance. I mean engagement. Any of you who are on the call from rural jurisdiction. You have to have a lot of endurance and perseverance as you work with your stakeholders to expand your target populations, to gain engagement support and what you do, and confidence from law enforcement. And we've seen that with the local support that we've been able to generate over the years. So you'll see. Back in 2019 this was 2,019. We had fiscal grant cycles back. Then we were 100 grant funded for our 1st one and a half years and we started getting a local support in 2020. 
But you'll see starting in 2021 when they really decided to make that big push and investment and follow best practices and make us an independent agency, that we've really seen a steady increase in the amount of money that they support and pour into us on a local level. 
So you'll see that online greenish color there is the local funding support that we received. And you'll see our grant funding support is went down. And we intentionally want to keep that grant funding going down and more local support, because we want that grant funding to be reserved for those newer counties that are starting out and need that technical assistance. And that support. 
So that is kind of our goal, of what we hope to do with that. 
The next thing I want to talk about is our intentional pretrial supervision. Because yes, we made an impact on our jail population. But we've also developed a model. And we've validated using our data that not only ensures community safety by keeping our safety rate stable, but it's also built. Our clients succeed beyond pre-trial. So we've seen lasting income outcomes and what we do. 
So we started to see a trend and kind of a little stagnation in our performance metrics. 
And when I say that I mean our success and our safety rates cause, we recognize that just focusing on compliance, based only metrics and failing to address clients, needs or connecting them with resources within the framework of best practices. There's no port order supervision. In Cass County. It was stagnating our growth, and we really wanted to ensure that as we grew that our performance metrics remain stable. 
And my judge actually reached out to me. She's a former prosecutor, and she says, you know, historically, defendants, they have to wait to conviction to be connected to services. And we're kind of ignoring the needs. Principle and people are in that crisis point. Is there a way within pre trial? Best practices to, not port order treatment, but to bring services in house and to have some referral sources. 
So we can help clients be more successful on pre trial supervision. 
So we kind of had the goal to develop a model and identify the 3 main target areas that we wanted to target these interventions into and to partner with local providers in our community. And we identified that employment. Residential stability, substance, use, and behavioral health were the main needs of our client, and we identified that by looking at our data but also by generating feedback from our clients. So I encourage you not just to look at quality data, but quality data as well. 
So we implemented a appointment protocol that was really unique to us that really made sure that we were focusing our supervision meetings in a mindset that was success oriented and that was truly different than post conviction here in Cass County, and that we also incorporated voluntary support services. 
With us. 
So we started that initiative and kind of wanted to monitor it and see how that was going, and some of the things you can click around on our website and see that that we decided to bring in. As we recognize, the technology was one of the best ways to communicate with our clients especially seeing a spike in our 18 to 25 year old population. So we really tried to leverage an existing resource we had with our website. 
So we flushed out some areas in our website that weren't just for our stakeholders, but that were also for our clients. 
So you'll see here, picture, we have a resources page. And in there this is also an app. That they can pull up on their phone. They can pay court costs and restitution restitution. They can look up when their hearing is they can pay BMV fees. They can look up local community behavior help providers, food pantries, housing resources, and things like that. They can also have access to online job portal. 
Where we have partnered with employers. In our local county, where they have direct links. To job portals and applications. We provide application assistance. So that is a way that we kind of overcame those various, but utilize an existing resource. That we have. We are continually trying to leverage our website and expand it and expand our resource inventory. So this was something that really just took us time. It was not a cost investment for us. We already had our website. 
We just took our resources and we took it from a static pamphlet and made it in a way that, could our clients could be engage in it that was meaningful to them, and that they could take with them and have anywhere other interventions or areas that we decided to target or implement into our program included again. Like I said, residential stability. And I really wanted to provide this as a resource for you. So if you're looking at, who can I? Partner with in my community? Think about your housing? Authorities, rent and financial assistance programs local shelters, rural communities often have county and city trustees that they have delegated funding that they can help people with. We also wanted to address education and employment, so we partnered with our staffing agencies. We have resume building classes that we can refer people to as well as a toolkit online. We brought in an online Hsc program that we not only host for our clients and pretrial, but we are able to expand for those who do remain incarcerated. 
For court appearance. That's a big risk factor for pretrial, the there's safe link for phones. There are other programs in the community that will provide people with free phones. We partnered with our local transit provider to provide free passes for our clients. 
And then we also made sure that we had connections for an online draper safety program. 
Substance use is a big barrier in our county, and a big need that we need to address with our clients. 
So we partnered with our local behavioral health provider, and we have therapists who are in house. That clients can come see one to 2 days a week. It's free at no cost to them. 
We don't believe in disparate treatment. So we've been able to allocate some resources where I pay that fee, and it's offered to all my clients equally if they choose to. It's not port ordered. If there are other services we need or if we want them to be in services that are a little bit more sustainable. Outside of the scope of our program. We have individual counselors that we can refer to peer support and recovery navigation services and then we also wanted to teach our clients skills or have them be able to set goals if they want to. So we also have a curriculum library with Change Company journals. Maybe someone wants to do a financial resource journal and learn how to better manage their money or do an employment journal to kind of overcome that barrier. And towards more skills we can provide that for them. 
So it took us probably about 3 years to fully flesh out this inventory. So I want to be transparent with you. This did not happen overnight, and we did this as a team. So our stakeholder team. We meet at least every quarter, but as part of our Jr. We most often meet almost every month of the year, and we were constantly getting feedback from our prosecutors and our public defenders. What about this need? Can you bring something in to help those who are victims of domestic violence, or who need assistance with childcare. So we really did this as a team exercise. 
So again, leverage that local sense of community we brought in outside providers and representatives from our schools. Behavioral health, our local drug free initiatives to really bring everybody at the table to maximize the resources that we had in our community in the end. That also strengthened our team. 
And we saw that that really produced a lot of results for us, and we were really excited to see that since become more data driven. What we saw is that clients really do have a motivation to engage in support services, and it is important for them. 
And it's a need that they need. 

Kristina Bryant: Not abnormal for a rural community to have some issues with the Internet. 
So we'll give Hillary just a moment. 
She is going to be able to rejoin us while we're waiting for her. We can open the QA. Again. I know the questions we have there now are for Hilary, so we hope that she will reconnect any other questions, though, that Hannah or I can answer while we're waiting couple of items we would share with you and follow up, and to the couple of people we have in our QAI will make sure that we do some one to one connection between Hilary and the questions that you have, so that you have some follow up to the questions you you asked here. 
But just in closing today's recording and the Powerpoint slides the resources that have been referenced. All of those will be sent to you an email, typically within 24 h of when we complete the session here today. In addition, you're gonna be able to find this on Youtube, the BJA's Youtube channel. So that link there may be of helpful of interest to you. And before we close out today there's gonna be a little pop up asking you to take 10 seconds and give us just a little bit of feedback on today's particular webinar, if and if in general these kind of sessions are helpful to you. Alright. So I have reviewed. The questions that are in our chats are in our QA. And I think they were more specifically for Hilary. And, like I said, we will do some direct follow up so that you are not left hanging. I want to publicly thank Hilary and Hannah for taking time for sharing their experiences. With you. I think it's. 

BJA NTTAC | Kiana: They! 

Kristina Bryant: Always back. 

BJA NTTAC | Kiana: Chris. 

Kristina Bryant: Oh, Hi, Hilary! Welcome back! 

Hillary Hartoin: I apologize everyone. We have a brief Internet outage in Indiana. 

Kristina Bryant: Well, we kind of acknowledge that it. This is not abnormal in rural communities that our Internet can be unstable. So you were finishing early results. 

Hillary Hartoin: Yes. 

Kristina Bryant: We lost you. 

Hillary Hartoin: I apologize. Everyone that was totally unpredictable. So what we found is that clients really want to engage in supportive services if you're willing to offer it to them, and you don't have to court order it. You just have to make it easily accessible and break those barriers, and you can have a huge impact. So in the 1st year that we really flushed out this model and tried to use it, we saw a 63% voluntary program engagement rate. And I think that's really good thing for you guys to measure is how many of your clients are motivated and have a need for this type of service for you to implement and with my staff we really wanted to develop a mindset where we have empathy and where we're really balancing accountability with opportunity and coming alongside our clients to support success. And we saw a growth in our staff development where we had almost a 40% increase in our supportive services referrals. And this resulted at a 25% reduction in technical violations. Whether it's barriers, barriers to reporting or to making port appearances. And we found that those who participate in support services only had a 2.5 revocation rate and that was a 22% decrease from calendar year 2022, and that was for the year 2023. So we were really excited about that. If you fast forward to last year, looking at 20 twenty-three's data, you'll see that we had a 66% going down and looking at the data, those who do engage in that. 90 of that percent of them are successful. And do very well, which we're really excited about.  wanted to dig a little bit deeper, being a data nerd myself, and I think my controls were taken away to move the slides. So if Chris or Hannah to move the slide to the one about engagement and supportive services versus not engagement. You'll see here that we were able, by keeping that baseline data that Hannah mentioned. If you really want to go back and do a comparison before you implement any policy and see how you've done. We were able to see the success across those 5 key metrics versus those who engaged in supportive services versus those who did and it was a average 25 difference. So we were really excited to see the impact and the value of what we were doing. So that was really important to us. As we were moving forward and trying to do what we're doing. So, as you can see, developing that appetite for data. figuring out how to communicate that to my stakeholders has allowed me to really evolve my program over the years and really leverage the unique strengths and opportunities that we have enrolled communities that maybe an urban community doesn't with that, and thank you all for being so patient with my technical issue. Chris might have some questions for me in the chat. 

Kristina Bryant: I do so. A couple of people are really interested in the data that you've been showing and want to know, like is, do you have a template that you're using? Is it something that you can share. 

Hillary Hartoin: With our data, I will, as a caveat mentioned, Indiana has invested a lot into pre-trial data, and we've developed a statewide pre-trial data system a lot of what I've shown you, though, in regards to visualizations and things like that, or templates that I created full disclosure. I have nothing special. I just use the free pages app on my iPad to do that. If someone, I'm sure that Chris has my email that we can drop in the chat would like a template. I have a couple of templates that are a little bit simplified that I'd be willing to share with anyone. but for me, the biggest thing I would recommend to you is to not think you have to have a fancy software or invest a lot of money to leverage what programs you already have. 

Kristina Bryant: Thank you. Our next question is, do the judges in your county believe in putting defendants on probation? 

Hillary Hartoin: Yes, we have a very large probation population. If you're looking at outcome data, what happens at the disposition of people's cases we do track that so we see the majority of our people who are adjudicated by either a guilty plea or a guilty conviction of their offense about 90, both to probation and less than 2 get an incarcerated term. Some go to community corrections, and we do have a good chunk. I believe the last review showed. Over 30% have their case dismissed, or they go pretrial diversion. Good. 

Kristina Bryant: Our next question has 2 parts. Is your office meeting with individuals prior to them, seeing the judicial officers who is setting the bond? And if so, is your office, then making recommendations to that officer. If the person would be a good candidate for pre-trial. 

Hillary Hartoin: So. Yes, we do. Pre trial evaluations. Monday through Friday. I'm actually the primary, a assessor. So with a rural community, you wear many hats. So I am a boots on the ground person. I'm not just an administrator. We go in every day. I start free screening around 4 30. Start evaluations. At 5 30 and prepare a report in Indiana. We use the Iras or the Oas and give it to my judicial officer we make a recommendation. If this person would be an appropriate candidate, they can refuse to participate because it is a cash bond system primarily, and then we also try to make an objective recommendation if a special condition is needed. But that's really something the judicial officer has to order. I can share that template. If someone would want us to do that. 

Kristina Bryant: Thank you. Hillary. Next question you mentioned how important the relationship component is for bring your about systematic change within the local system. Has that served as the foundation from which you've been able to secure more and more local support, both financially and non-financial, for your program. 

Hillary Hartoin: Absolutely relationships are key. And that's the biggest thing that I don't think us as rural communities recognize is that our greatest asset is that we really have leverage, that small town support that more intimate stakeholder group. You don't have to drive 40 min to talk to your judicial officers or your chief police. Oftentimes you're in the same building. So make yourself present and known. So I really fostered that relationship. I held trainings with my law enforcement officers. They all know who I am. I learned what the impact of what I do has on other players in the system. So one of the very 1st things I did was observe the booking process. I actually booked someone in the jail. I wanted to see what me going in there. How was that was going to disrupt their process? That not only was an education to me, but it helped those other people in the system feel like I heard them, and I took the time to understand what their processes and that foster a better relationship with us. 

Kristina Bryant: Thank you. We have 2 more questions. Does anyone else offer to provide referrals for services, even when folks aren't reporting to your office. 

Hillary Hartoin: In the pre trial stage. Attorneys and things like that can provide referrals. But due to a funding cut. Our public defenders office does not have that position anymore. They used to have an inpatient treatment navigator when that position was lost. We didn't get any extra funding, but we were so passionate about that that we took that under our umbrella so there are lots of community resources. We've just referenced those relationships. And we brought them all in house because you think about it. People have limited resources. We don't want it to be onerous if they have to go here and there. Maybe with limited gas. So we try to bring everything in house. Make it to where they can report to one place and do that. 

Kristina Bryant: Wonderful one last question it was noted just how much? Success you've had since 2,018. The person asked, what did pre-trial look like in 2018. So probably prior to you being involved. 

Hillary Hartoin: There was no free trial release. There was just a cash fund system, a very overburden jail, so there was none. And what happened is, there was a judicial conference, they're, you know, promoting these grants and this opportunity and there was the initiative with the State, and it was kind of that perfect climate to take a chance and try something new. So we kind of hit a crisis point in our county. The State had this technical assistance available so the judge gave me a call up one day when I still worked in the clerk's office and said, Hey, do you want to try to solve this problem, I'll give you 2 months to do it. The story is, I bargained for a little bit longer than that, but that's just kind of how we were born. We had that question that Hannah talked about, and we decided to take a chance on a solution to see if it would work, and it's just kind of slowly grown from there. 

Kristina Bryant: Thank you. So, Hilary and Hannah, I would like to give each of you a minute to kind of close out with any final thoughts and Hillary. Since you are already on my camera, I'm gonna start with you. Any final thoughts for our audience. 

Hillary Hartoin: I would just say, really, don't just look and think of the world. Community is having barriers. Look at what your strengths are, and really leverage and utilize those. And then, as someone brought up with the questions relationships and mindset and working together, that's your biggest asset. So foster that cherish it and nourish that, because that's where role can really shine. And that's how you can be successful. 

Hannah Turner: I feel like I can't say anything. That sort of doesn't just echo what Hillary just said. But definitely for us, when we do these types of projects. You know, what we're really trying to do is just facilitate essentially the types of you know, convenings that Hillary is talking about where we always want to bring together. Not just, you know, the director of free trial services, but also judges, defenders, law enforcement on this project in Columbus County. We had a representative from the local Mental health authority that was there as well. So you know, when you come together, you don't really know necessarily what you're gonna find. But folks are on the same page more often than you might think in our experience. In all types of jurisdictions, people have common goals just a matter of getting together and finding out what they are. 

Kristina Bryant: Thank you. Thank you both to Hillary and Hannah for taking time again to share their case study from each of their communities or the communities they were working with in Hannah situation. We do promise to gather up the resources they've either shared in chat, or they talked about sharing with you, and that will be in the follow up email to you. NTTAC had already started our closing survey, so I'm not sure if they can start it again, or if it's already up, if it is, we do ask that. You just take a moment and give us that feedback. It's helpful. This is the 1st of a series of webinars that we will do around pre-trial that is hosted by BJA. You everyone who has joined us today, our audience. Thank you so much. Hopefully. Again, you felt heard, you feel seen in a rural community that was part of our intentions. Today we appreciate your time. Thank you. Everyone.