Centralized Services in Pretrial: What Is Working in Three Leading States

KRIS BRYANT: Hello, everyone. You are joining us today for “Centralized Services in Pretrial: What is Working in Three Leading States.” We are excited to share with you the work that's been going on for some time that has been building in Kentucky and Montana and New Mexico.

The webinar today is going to be handled through a question-and-answer process. So, as you are joining us, you should be able to access a question-and-answer grouping area. Please feel free to share your questions with us. We're going to make sure that they either get answered in typing, in communication back to you, or live with our actual speakers today. Looks like most of our attendees have populated the room. Rest assured, our session today is being recorded. The PowerPoint slides, as well as the recording. will be available to you at the conclusion, likely tomorrow, after it is finalized.

So, let's start again. Welcome everybody. You're joining us today at “Centralized Services in Pretrial: What is Working in Three Leading States.” My name is Kris Bryant. I serve as a Visiting Fellow at BJA. I am focused on pretrial, and I am very happy to be bringing to you three practitioners in the field who are working specifically in the area of regional or centralized pretrial specific services.

So, you're going to get to hear today from Angie Darcy from Kentucky; Mike Ferriter from Montana; and then Kelly Bradford from New Mexico. 

How our process is going to work today is I'm going to give you just a little bit of background on OJP and BJA just in case you're not familiar with us, and then I'll turn it over to Kentucky. We're going to stop at the end of Kentucky, and any questions you have I'm going to encourage you to have typed them into the chat room at that point, so Angie is able to address them. We'll give that question-and-answer session about five minutes, and then we'll move on to Montana and repeat that process with Q&A, and then to New Mexico and Q&A, and we specifically chose to do it this way because we are not comparing these states.

Each of the states have adopted practices that represent the culture and the work that they have going on in their states. So we didn't want to necessarily mix your questions and answers across them. So please feel free to engage in the Q&A. Please feel free to ask questions.

A little bit of background is where we're going to start. So if you're not familiar with BJA, BJA is part of the Office of Justice Programs. BJA is joined by Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Institute of Justice, the Office for Victims of Crime, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and our SMART Office. Most of our work at OJP is in the area of grant funding, training, research, statistics, all touching the criminal justice community. Hopefully, you have heard of us, maybe even received grants from us, possibly received training from us. Specifically, BJA is under Director Karlton Moore. Our mission is to provide leadership and services in grant administration and in criminal justice policy to help states, local, and tribes achieve safer communities. And we do that through investing in our communities and seed money and the work that's happening in sharing knowledge with the research that is produced from those grants, and through our other sister agencies and helping develop new things that are going on in the field and delivering a what's worked is happening, with capacity specifically for us in the area of pretrial.

We're also interested in engaging. So, bringing to you that technical assistance engaging across different communities. They're doing like things and learning from each other. So what you see here is how we try to touch the field: the investments, the sharing of knowledge and the engagement.

Today, we're here to talk specifically about the centralized pretrial services. What we hope to share with you is what those services are in each of the states, what drove their decision towards centralized pretrial operations, how that success is being defined in their states, and then what they've learned. So recognizing, they may be talking to an audience of individuals who are interested in having these discussions in their states, we ask them to bring to you what lessons they would want to share with you. 

So, we are ready to get started. And that means, Angie, I'm going to ask you to turn on your camera, turn yourself off of mute, and I will turn it over to you.

ANGIE DARCY: Thanks, Kris, I appreciate it. So, thank you for having me here today. I'm excited to talk to you about what we do in Kentucky. I like to say in Kentucky we like to do things weird, so we are kind of a centralized—but also a little bit decentralized—process.

It's going to take a couple seconds for the slide to catch up. There we go. So, I'll talk about what works. So in 2017, we went to—what we realized in Kentucky was that we were having an issue with our risk assessment. We were having an issue with the accuracy for the risk assessment and also our data quality. So we took a look at it and decided—and that was when Tara was here—and we decided to centralize the risk assessment process. So our risk assessment, the public safety assessment, is a centralized process. We have four risk assessment coordinators, 54 risk assessment specialists. Our risk assessment positions are located statewide and we have three shifts to provide 24/7 coverage for those positions. 

This is how our process works in Kentucky. I don't know if anybody is familiar with Kentucky's process, but we have a statewide pretrial system, so we are very, in many ways, unique. We also don't have bail bondsmen in Kentucky. So when someone is arrested, we are the frontline workers that interview, we intake that arrest at booking, and we also process the judge call.

So, a defendant gets arrested. The charging documents are entered into our pretrial system, so that means that the citation is entered into our pretrial system, and then it's automatically transferred to The Que. We have this web-based system called The Que, and The Que intakes the defendant, and then that lets the risk assessor know that they need to do the risk assessment on that person. So it's really unique that the interview, the pretrial interview with the defendant and the risk assessment could actually be happening at the same time. And it's auto-sorted by priority. So we look at the time that it's due. So, usually our PSS—our pretrial service specialists—will put in there what time it is due by, and that bases it on what time is court. If court is in the morning, what time does that judge do court? What time do all those presentations have to be ready, or if it's during the evening, what time is the judge call? And then also what we prioritize is our pre-arraignment release protocol, and that's where we are actually allowed to release defendants on our own without a judge call. So if somebody would be eligible for the pre-arraignment release protocol, we will prioritize that. And we look at that based on charge, and the risk assessment specialists actually know what's prioritized in the field. So they make that decision. We also do a criminal history investigation at that time. That is something that our risk assessment specialists do. The public safety assessment is completed, and then they return it back to the case management system. So once that's done and our pretrial service specialist then takes that PSA and makes that presentation along with our pretrial history report to the judge.

So, one of the reasons why we did this is, as I spoke about a little bit before, is that we had to improve the fidelity of the tool. We were having really low accuracy rates. And so, when you looked at the public safety assessment, it might not be entirely accurate with the people that were grading it. So we created these risk assessment specialists so we could have more accuracy. It would also improve our staff productivity, because now we can look at The Que and see how many risk assessments are done per hour, per day, per month, and that goes into our tableau database and it lets us look at productivity of our staff. It also increased expediency with processing our clients. So it's no longer reliant on our pretrial service specialists taking the arrest, then doing the public safety assessment, then interviewing the client and then presenting all that information to the judge. That that can be a very slow process, and depending on that criminal history, it can also be cumbersome. 

So, now we have 54 risk assessment specialists out there that can actually take that and conduct that at the same time the pretrial interview is happening. So it's a very unique system. 

So, we also centralized our interviews. So we have a second and third shift. It used to be in 2017 and 2018 we created these two hubs. We'll call them the hubs. One was in Bowling Green, and one was in Johnson County, and these were second- and third-shift employees, and they worked, and what they did was they did everything remotely. They would contact the detention centers to get all the pretrial citations coming in. There's an email system that actually everybody could click on whoever was next and enter that into the system. And that would be  the person that they interviewed, and they could do all that from remote locations. We did phase them out in 2021, when all shift employees started providing remote coverage and not just the hub.  

And then COVID happened. And so pretrial services, since we were kind of already starting that process with the hub and our risk assessment specialists, we completely had to centralize out of necessity. So we had to do remote coverage statewide. Everybody was working from home. Microsoft Teams hotlines were created for judicial partners and the public and our jails. The Kentucky Detention Center would send the charging documents directly to an email address to us, and then we would upload the citation that way. We were also checking the booking websites and justice exchange, and so everything was completely centralized. The only thing that wasn't completely centralized was our NCIC background checks, and those were dispersed throughout the throughout the state.

We continue to serve justice-involved persons. We conducted pretrial interviews, risk assessments and executed releases. We also did our monitor-conditioned release, which is our supervised release. We also did that remotely as well.

Here comes the downside. It didn't fully work for Kentucky pretrial services to be completely centralized. And one of the things that we found was that those local relationships were really important. Our judges really wanted to have that relationship with our pretrial service specialists, and also our pretrial service specialists really wanted to have those relations with the community as well. So we kind of isolated them. It was more of a call center type model. And we were having issues with consistency. We never knew who clicked on an email to start a pretrial citation. So you didn't know if a pretrial citation was completed and just based on the email. Sometimes our email system was so wonky that it would repopulate the citation again. So we were constantly having to check and make sure that citation wasn't entered into the system, and with the statewide schedule we had this big, huge, statewide schedule, and it really led to a poor work life balance. And so we kind of listened to everybody. We did a survey. I talked to people when I first started and said, “Hey, what's working? What's not working?” And we kind of looked at it and took what we could to centralize and then decentralize the rest. And when I say decentralized, I really mean that we went into a more regional process. 

So, the centralized processes that we kept were the public safety assessment with our risk assessment specialists and also second and third shift. So all of our second and third shift do judge calls in the evening. They do still have the same judges that they might call on a regular basis. So it's we still have that kind of local feel. But they're still centralized. So they could potentially be calling a Western Kentucky judge when they're in Eastern Kentucky, but we try to keep that with the same employees on a regular basis. So the judges build relationships with those pretrial service specialists and know who they're talking to and know that they can trust them when they make a presentation. 

Our regionalized processes have gone from the day-to-day operations. So our jail coverage with our pretrial interviews are regionalized and our court coverage is regionalized, and also our pretrial supervision is regionalized. One of the things that we still have is the regional hotlines, where, if somebody is calling to check in on supervision, they could be calling into Pike County. But somebody from Johnson County may answer the phone, so it may not be the same pretrial service specialist, but if it's just a check-in, they have a script that they follow, and then they answer the phone. And then just mark that the person checked in with them that day. It's a centralized regional process for our monitor condition release.

And, here are the advantages of regionalizing our operations that we found. So it builds and strengthens. I talked about it a little bit before, but it builds and strengthens our relationships with our judges, our clerks, our jailers, and our other local partners, and we thought that was really important, because when you're in the criminal justice world, it is kind of a very strong sense of community and almost a second family because you're going through these things together, and you're going to know your local county attorney, and you're going to know your judge. So we thought that those relationships were important, and that was also expressed to us by our justice partners as well, that they really wanted to keep that relationship. So we listened to that. It also increases our staff morale and retention. There is something to be said about the routine and knowing your judge and knowing your county attorney and knowing your public defenders and knowing who you're talking to in your community. It was really, I think, sometimes, with our centralized process, out of necessity, when we were doing it, judges would get really angry because different judges want different things in Kentucky. So when you were presenting making a presentation, and you're maybe from Eastern Kentucky, and tonight you had to call Judge Smith from Western Kentucky, and it's the first time that you've ever talked to Judge Smith, well, Judge Smith wants to hear a certain thing from you, and you may not know that. And so that was causing some anxiety in our staff and also anxiety with the judges as well. So we wanted to give them back that local flavor. So we changed that up. And it also gives us greater staff accountability, especially with our jails and citation processes. When we did the centralized process, we did not know who was touching a citation because it was in an email account that all of our pretrial service specialists could access. So nobody knew who opened it, who entered it, necessarily. And so were accuracy issues there. There were process issues there, and so by giving it the more regionalized centralized flavor it. It gave us more accountability, and I think that was ultimately helpful to our staff and also to us.

So, this is actually our regional map. We have, I believe it is now 14 regional supervisors, and we have 12, well, actually, it's 16, because we have the evening supervisors for second and third shift. So we have 14 regions in the Commonwealth of Kentucky that we split up, and you can see our map and what that looks like. And that's it.

KRIS BRYANT: Angie, we have a couple of questions for you in the chat box, or in our Q& A box. The first one is asking, “If you complete a risk assessment on only the people in the jail, or do you do others as well? Those outside of jail”.

ANGIE DARCY: So, in Kentucky, we do only in jail. However, if a judge asks us to, we could do a risk assessment. But our main purpose with Kentucky pretrial services is to get them released from jail. So our primary, statutory, and criminal rule duties are to get them released from jail. That's what we're here for.

KRIS BRYANT: Before I ask you the second question, I'm just going to remind everyone, if you have a question, please type it into our Q&A box so that we're able to address it live. So our second question is, “How do pretrial specialists access NCIC? Are they in the office?”

ANGIE DARCY: Yes. So for the most part we have one NCIC machine in every county. Now, as everybody knows, NCIC is one of those beasts, so there are some counties that we have not been approved to have an NCIC machine in, and for those that we don't have an NCIC machine, we have a Teams chat for first, second, and third shift, and oftentimes you'll see somebody reaching out and saying, “Hey, can somebody do an NCIC check for me,” and then usually what they'll do is call them and tell them what is on the NCIC check since we can't email it or put it in writing. We just do a simple phone call. But for the most part, everybody is in office running the NCIC checks.

KRIS BRYANT: Question is, “Do the regional staff providing coverage to the courts in person, or do they appear via video during court proceedings?”

ANGIE DARCY: Both. It depends on our judges and what our judges prefer. Some of our judges do Zoom court, and then some of our judges do not. And then sometimes there are certain circumstances where we're not in court or on Zoom at all, and judges prefer that we just email them our risk assessment report. We have a nice little spreadsheet that we will email some judges and let them know what the defendant’s risk level is. what any extenuating circumstances that the judge should know, and what our recommendations on bond are. So we have a nice handy spreadsheet that we've created for some judges, but for the most part we're either in court or in Zoom.

KRIS BRYANT: “Do you have a work release facility, and if so, do you ever put defendants in work release under pretrial?”

ANGIE DARCY: So, in Kentucky, I think we're unique because we have a county jail system. So the county jail system, Rebecca operates the work release. So pretrial does not have anything to do with work release, that is all up to the county jail system.

KRIS BRYANT: This next question, I think, is trying to make sure we're comparing apples to apples. So the question is, “Is the PSA equivalent to a bond to a bail report, and is the judge call equivalent to a bond hearing?”

ANGIE DARCY: So, the PSA is—and I'm not sure exactly what you mean by bail report—but a PSA is our risk assessment, which determines what level of risk the defendant is for new criminal activity, or what, we should say, outcome, what the outcome would be for the defendant's failure to appear. So we're looking at the success rate. And that's what our PSA does is that it grades that, and then gives that the court, so the court can make a better determination along with other factors that the court's supposed to look at. So it's, hey, this is what the probability that they would commit a new criminal activity, or the probability of them appearing for court, and a judge call is equivalent to a bond hearing. So in Kentucky we do not do first appearances necessarily. We do our Riverside hearing, our 48-hour hearing, through a judge call. So we present the citation and the facts on the citation, and also our pretrial history report to the judge, and then the judge makes the determination whether or not what to set the bond at. If the person is not eligible for the pre-arraignment release protocol. 

KRIS BRYANT: These are great questions, and it is difficult when you're trying to compare things from state to state, because we do call things a little differently. “So, just to confirm, do you operate 24/7?”

ANGIE DARCY: We do. We operate 24/7. We only have about five or six on third shift. Their main duty is to see if people eligible for the pre-arraignment release protocol. We have about 26 employees on second shift, and then the bulk of our employees for the pretrial service specialists are on first shift. The risk assessment specialists are spread out semi-evenly on first, second, and third shift.

KRIS BRYANT: “In the PSA, is it only addressing failure to appear? Or are there other factors, such as the likelihood of new charges or criminal history?”

ANGIE DARCY: So the PSA does do both. And the Arnold Foundation is actually the one that created the public safety assessment, and it does both. It does failure to appear, and also the likelihood of new criminal activity. So it does both. It looks at the criminal history, and that's what it builds from to get the new criminal activity.

KRIS BRYANT: Alright, Angie, thank you so much. We might come back around to you in the end. If we have some extra time.

ANGIE DARCY: Thank you.

KRIS BRYANT: Mike, I'm going to welcome you to join us, to unmute yourself. Turn on your camera. We see you. Hi, Mike, thank you.

MIKE FERRITER: Kris, are you ready for me.

KRIS BRYANT: I sure am. Thank you, Mike.

MIKE FERRITER: Okay, thank you. Thanks everyone. I appreciate you taking some time to listen about what we're doing. A few things that I want to mention before the slide presentation. I want to share my…

KRIS BRYANT: I just want to give you a little tip when you turn away from us. Your microphone must be really sensitive, so you have to be looking right at the camera. Thanks.

MIKE FERRITER: Okay. Thank you. A little history about my work. I worked 38 years in the Department of Corrections in many aspects, and one of the things that I failed, I would say in my years, in management and in the field, is that I really didn't look at the pretrial end of things, and a long story short, I think that the correction system, as I looked at it, could have benefited a great deal if we would have put more emphasis on the front end of the system. I just wanted to share that with you. I also wanted to let you know that as I listen to my counterparts, and in Kentucky and New Mexico, we're doing a lot of things the same.

But I think you'll hear today that we're doing things a little bit different in Montana, and, as you can see on the screen, Montana truly is a rural state. We're fourth largest in state by area and seventh smallest in population. So we have some different challenges when you look at pretrial. As you can see, we have a county with 554 people. The reality of doing a pretrial program in a county like that, stand alone, is not very likely. 

So what we do in Montana is really two things with our centralized process is we do public safety assessments, as you heard from Kentucky, and we generate pretrial performance measurement reports. We do other things. But those are really the two key components. So it's managed by the Office of the Court Administrator, our public safety assessment end of things. We have three processors, three individuals, that their sole responsibility is to do public safety assessments, criminal history checks, and a few other things, but, as you can see on the screen, they work from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., six days a week. and we are a pilot project. So we're not covering all of our counties. We're working with about eight counties now out of 56, but some of the more larger ones, and one of the values of having the project within the Court Administrators offices we have full access to CJIN, NCIC, as well as all the Supreme Court repositories. We have good access to information which is proven to be very helpful.

One of the things that I wanted to share with you, as I indicated, is that we're stand alone with our product. But the Montana legislature provided fundings for this project. So we're able to grant some of our funding to the pilot counties. We utilize some of our funds for processing. The vast majority of the funding goes to our pilot companies for clientele management for supervision, monitoring, whatever that particular county might be. So again, we're different in that we only do the public safety assessments. Then the money for supervision check-ins, drug testing, those kind of things, are handed over to the participating counties, that’s quite different. Like Kentucky said, we worked with the Arnold Foundation. They provided us a great deal of assistance in developing our program, and have assisted the counties in development of their supervision and other processes in the county.

The document you have now is important because this demonstrates how the workflow is between the state office and the county offices. It's kind of a watered-down version of that, but it's been very important for us that every county knows, and the stakeholders in each county know, what the responsibility is when we're operating kind of a project at the two segments. This has proven to be really helpful and making sure that that all the responsibility [INDISCTINCT].

The Montana legislature put this in statute. It required us to have a validated risk assessment. And again, that's why we got involved with the Arnold Foundation. And we utilize [INDISCTINCT]. The overall project was part of a reinvention of corrections in the criminal justice system in Montana, and this was a small piece of that. And again, that's why we  [INDISCTINCT]. One of the main components was to improve jail population, to reduce jail population. That's why the counties that were selected. They were really down with overcrowding, and, of course, we really wanted to introduce an opportunity for a meaningful first hearing for defendants entering the system on the pretrial base.

One of the things you can imagine with being a state agency demonstration project, measurement was pretty critical. But we do a great deal of measurement. We knew for us to be solid with this project we needed to do that. As you can see, we report quarterly to county stakeholders. Each county is required to have a stakeholder group. By statute, we have an advisory council that was appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Very active. They've been very active with us, but they, of course, want to see what the measurements are.

We provide reports to the Montana legislature. We meet every two years. We have a report prepared for that. And then on our website, we keep our data, our performance measurements. There's 24 measurement points that was approved by our advisory council. And we keep that available updated on the website.

And you can see, here's some of the basic components of the performance measurement report as we call it. I won't bore you with going through all of that. But, like I said, there's 24 points. And those are the things that our advisory council, our state legislator wants to know the outcomes on an ongoing basis. One of the things you can see under the fourth component of that is we do measure pretrial release levels for you that are utilizing the public safety assessment. You might understand the value of that is we want to see that if people are detained, if they're released, if they violate, what level were they on the PSA. One of the things that's kind of interesting, at least for me personally, of those individuals that are not released, what level are they on? That's one of the things that we question our counties from time to time. Why are so many people detained on level two, or level one, in particular? So, that that really gives us some data that gives us an opportunity to see what a problem might be.

And of course, you all know the pretrial release outcomes that Kentucky mentioned. We measure all court appearances, and we want to ensure that defendants are remaining law-abiding. For my many years of in correction, it’s really nice to have [INDISCTINCT] narrow down measurement. And this has been really helpful, as we present to the legislature that we really focus on those two things and not trying to overcome a methamphetamine program or mental health [INDISCTINCT]. You all know this is a short period of time. We're trying to see what we can accomplish on pretrial to better produce those two specific outcomes.

This is an example of what our Montana pretrial comparison report is. We not only compare internally from quarter to quarter. We also [INDISCTINCT] three- or four-page report. I'm just showing you one. It's been really helpful. We've worked really hard to make it easy to read and easy to follow, and that's been really helpful. But if anyone's want more information on that, I could certainly provide you the entire report. And again, we do this on a quarterly basis for each of the counties. [INDISCTINCT] improving if they're more challenged. That also includes those different levels that I mentioned to see if they're gaining any improvement on releasing people on, say, level two. 

Again, this, this is where we're different. We're granting the funds for supervision for those other factors that go on in pretrial to the county. So we have an agreement. We call in an interagency agreement. It's an agreement between the court administrator's office and the pretrial counties, and we prepare this report. Stakeholders review it, county commissioners sign off, sheriff signs off, whoever the county thinks is appropriate. And I could share that agreement with you as well. If you went down an avenue like Montana's gone, that agreement is really critical.

Just some highlights of what the county responsibilities are in that interagency agreement. Again, they're required to use the public safety assessment as adopted by the Arnold Foundation. They have to do new data on the automated system, it’s called AutoMon. They have to insert information into that. That's how we measure things. They have to participate in trainings. I think it's really an important thing they have to agree to have the stakeholder meetings twice a year. I think communication is the key in this project. [INDISCTINCT] the sheriff, [INDISCTINCT] staff, leadership. public defender, county attorney, pretrial staff need to get together a couple of times a year to make sure that things are going in the right direction.

And then this next slide is OCA's responsibility. That's in the agreement as well, similar stuff. We provide training. We provide access to the AutoMon system. We hire and train the processing staff. We provide the data. We do criminal history checks, and we attend one of those stakeholder meetings per year to ensure that the communication and the goals and objectives are being met.

Okay, the summary of a few things I want to share with you before I sign off. The benefits that are that we have found, Kentucky mentioned, is the fact that we have such a rural state, my experience, like many of yours will tell you that asking detention staff, the process of public safety assessment, is quite a challenge, and probably a difficult, very difficult for them to do. That's why we elect to consolidate and share the resources. Again, practical for Montana. We certainly promote having a centralized investment center, certainly promote consistency and accuracy. I just checked today, and we have now completed over 35,000 public safety assessments. So as I did my staffing time today we're pretty good. We have very few challenges. We have very few complaints from judges, county attorneys, defense attorneys. We're very thorough, because that is what they do. They don't have a lot of outside responsibilities. So we clearly have acquired the consistency and accuracy that we were hoping a centralized system would do. Our staff are trained, skill focused and dedicated. They're not asked to do a lot of other things other than processing the public safety assessments. We've had staff, the three processors have been with us now for over five years, so they are dedicated. And I think that we've cleaned up a lot of things, and the communication's been good, I think that’s helped.

And again, I mentioned it, the timely processing, we know the court deadlines. We've committed in that interagency agreement that we'll have the public safety assessment to the judge, county attorney, and defense attorneys two hours before the court dates [INDISCTINCT]. We committed to that, we meet that responsibility.

And then again, we have access to confidential information and court repositories of information. We have our own CJIN terminal [INDISTINCT] and OCA [INDISTINCT] really helpful and a real key piece to this centralized process.

The last thing I want to share with you is, if you were to look on the road like Montana has, I think the real keys to such an approach are the things that I have up on the board.

Suggestions for success. You need ownership. We have, like, I said, an appointed advisory committee and an appointed working committee who have really worked with us in development along with the representatives from the Arnold Foundation, Mike Jones in particular, who helped with us a great deal, that's been helpful. It's given us a lot of authority and support, having judges and county attorneys on that advisory council. That's been really helpful. The interagency agreement, that has to be really clear, approved, signed on, agreed upon, that really made things work well. The flow document. That was one of the things that we required every county to do was to provide…the detention staff sends us the booking document, and then it follows the steps all the way through until the document is completed, and the staff and the counties have the information, along with the key stakeholders. That's critical, to have that have that in writing. We review that to make sure that things haven't changed. Communication, very critical. 

And, I mentioned the monthly stakeholder meetings. We meet our processing staff, a Zoom Meeting, once a month with the case managers and people in the pretrial world and the counties to make sure that everything is going smooth, everybody's fulfilling the goals of the program. Routine internal audits. For my years of experience in the system, I know that you have to provide accurate information. The thing that I knew when I was asked to take a lead in this project that we could not fumble. We could not make a lot of mistakes. We could not lose our credibility, though a part of that, along with all the communication that I mentioned, is that we do routine internal audits. Our staff audit each other. I audit the staff. We make sure that our information going out on the public safety assessment is accurate, because, as you all know, you do not want to lose credibility with a judge or county attorney or public defender. So our staff is very, very clear on making sure that what goes out is accurate and thorough. 

So, that is the information I wanted to share with you today. Again, we're a little different than New Mexico. We're a little different than Kentucky. It's a different approach. A lot of that came from my experience in corrections and having contracted with some for-profit, mostly non-profit agencies, some counties. We've got a little nickname with that. If you're interested, it's not a bad approach. We don't have a lot of employees. We leave a lot of that responsibility to the counties, and how they want to do things in particular. So we're a little hands off the day-to-day operations. I think that's appreciated in some ways. So thank you, Kris, that's what I had to say.

KRIS BRYANT: Mike, we do have some questions for you. Before we turn to the questions. If you are not looking right at the video in the mic, even moving forward a little, we lose what you say.

MIKE FERRITER: I've had trouble.

KRIS BRYANT: That's all right. We're going to make it work. So I think Tiana was asking if you could just share a little bit more information around your performance reporting and maybe there's something we could also share in writing later. Can you want to talk a little bit more about the performance reporting.

MIKE FERRITER: Yes. Like I said, we were given direction on what the legislature, what our advisory committee wanted. Again, I was in corrections that many years, I ended up my department director. So I know how that goes with legislators wanting more and more information. We were fortunate that we settled on what it is, about 24 individual components, but mostly what we look at the big categories and it breaks down is we do volume. How many PSAs we've done. Compare county by county. We looked at defendant status following their arrest  Are they released? Are they detained? I mentioned some stuff earlier. We talked about defendants’ level, those that are released and the defendants that are that are detained. We talked about that. We specifically focus on court appearances. How many make it? What are the percentages? What are the actual numbers from each of the counties? We look at the defendant's rate of being rearrested. Because again, that's one of the key components. And we look at why they were rearrested while they were on pretrial. Was it a felony? Was it a misdemeanor? And was it a violent offense? There are components, smaller pieces of that, but those are the main categories that we look at, again, trying to focus on the levels, and if they were rearrested and making court appearances. When we share this with the county, those are the factors that we need to improve there. Why is this county significantly better than that county? And why were you better last quarter than this quarter? So it really gives us a chance to have some concrete data to look at and to try to improve.

KRIS BRYANT: We can hear you perfectly during your answer.

MIKE FERRITER: Alright.

KRIS BRYANT: So Kathy is asking if you have experienced any issues getting CJIS access at your state office of the courts.

MIKE FERRITER: No, I think that's the value of being in state office. That was one of the decisions, I think [INDISTINCT]. 

KRIS BRYANT: You are just to the side of your mic, so we can't actually hear you. There you go.

MIKE FERRITER: Right. My experience tells me that I know that CJIN terminals are tricky. They're protected. So that's one of the things we have an office that's secure. We call it the situation room. There's no windows, there's no access without a key. So that makes the CJIN people happy. Another real positive reason to, I think, to have this centralized service, I can't imagine trying to deal with numerous offices, with CJIN terminals. and our staff, of course, is trained. They got to go through training annually, pass tests. We only have three people that have to acquire that level of training.

KRIS BRYANT: So Stephanie is asking you about your working committees. Can you just talk about what the purpose of that is?

MIKE FERRITER: Well, we had kind of a high-level advisory committee, and certainly I can go through that. But we had county attorneys, the chair is a retired District Court judge. We had other District Court judges, a legislator from the House and the Senate. We had enough knowledge about what it takes to have an advisory committee that has some influence, so that, in turn, that group was high level. One member of the Supreme Court. So they in turn appointed a working committee, which was not the county attorney, but a deputy county attorney. Maybe not the sheriff, but an under-sheriff, so members of the public defender system, not the chief public defender, like we have on our advisory committee. So they worked with us on developing the process, the steps, developing our pretrial guide that the judges have when they look at to determine what level of release. What the conditions are. So they did the nitty gritty. So we have kind of a high-level advisory committee that gives us cover, so to speak, with the legislature and support. And then actually, some hands-on people that work in the jail, public defenders. county attorneys, law enforcement that helped us work through these steps. We call on them from time to time. We have a question if we need to change something.

Most of our policies and direction is ran past our advisory committee again. I’ve been in the system a long time, and I know the value of having stakeholders and other individuals to support you. So that would be another key to success. Make sure you have those people on board, and you're not going it alone on this project.

KRIS BRYANT: So, Mike, our next question is from Sherry, and I think she's probing. “Were you all moving this statewide process into localities that already had a pretrial program? So were there already existing programs there? And if so, how did you bring them into the centralized process?”

MIKE FERRITER: There was a little bit of both. We have a couple of counties that are not part of our project. They elected to continue their own. But we, we have the support of the legislature. We have the funding. We approach other counties that already had a pretrial system and said, “Hey, we can help you. You do not utilize need to utilize your resources on processing public safety assessments. We can do that for you. We have the funds for that. So you utilize your funds for case management, whatever, what other pieces of that you might want.” We had stakeholders from all of these different counties. They supported that concept, convinced local stakeholders that, hey, we got nothing to lose here. We've got a centralized process, do the PSAs for us, and we can utilize our resources in different directions. There were some hurdles to get over. But with the help of Mike Jones again and the Arnold Foundation, we went around and did big stakeholder meetings to all the counties, and brought in judges and those sort of things. And we were accepted. And actually, in the last couple of years, we've had very few issues with that concept.

KRIS BRYANT: Wonderful. Those interagency agreements that you mentioned. How often are those reviewed and re-signed? Is there a change of guards because people turn over in the localities.

MIKE FERRITER: Once a year, we're budgeted on an annual basis. So we were required to do an update of the interagency agreement once a year, so that's helpful. It was pretty smooth operation. Now make a few changes here and there, but mostly it has to do with the funding and that sort of thing. But funding hasn't changed a great deal either. But annually the end of every fiscal year we submit a new one.

KRIS BRYANT: I'm going to give you some grace.

MIKE FERRITER: I pay for all the bills and those kind of things come through my office. We pay those for staff and drug testing and that kind of thing on a monthly basis, not real difficult.

KRIS BRYANT: Original stakeholder group are the impetus for this work. Where did that come from?

MIKE FERRITER: From the direction came from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who I work under and work under his administrator, and we looked at some data. He knew that there was issues, in these counties that I mentioned with jail population in particular. That was really the key. Why did we pick this county over that. It was because they were struggling were with the jail numbers, and so the Chief Justice, Mike McGrath, selected those counties after we provided them some data, and then he selected advisory council members from each of those counties to help support the project in those counties. So wise person as you could imagine, being the Chief Justice. He knew you had to get some key people supporting this and helping us present this to the other members in that county.

KRIS BRYANT: I thank you for sharing your experience very much. Appreciate it. Stick around.

MIKE FERRITER: I apologize for cutting off.

KRIS BRYANT: The question-and-answer part went really well. So if we have any, we'll allow some time at the end, and there's some additional questions based on time they couldn't hear. We'll be able to go back over that. Thank you, Mike.

Kelly. I want to invite you to the floor. Have you turn on your camera, unmute yourself, and I'm going to turn it over to you.

KELLY BRADFORD: Wonderful. Thank you and thank you everyone for joining us today. So I'm Kelly Bradford. I'm with the Administrative Office of the Courts in New Mexico. So we're going to talk a little bit about New Mexico, and I think what the other folks have talked about is we're doing a lot of the same things in different ways, probably from our needs and our resource standpoint. So we'll kind of jump into it, and you'll be able to figure out kind of what we're doing the same, and maybe what we're doing a little bit differently.

All right. So a little thing a little bit about New Mexico, to kind of set the landscape, in a sense. We are the fifth largest state. We also have a population statewide of 2.1 million. So we are a big state with lots of people spread out in between, and on average it equals out to 17 people per square mile. So that was one of the hurdles we had to figure out when we were developing our framework of how we were going to do this was we were going to have places like Albuquerque, which is our most populous jurisdiction in Bernalillo County, to places where they might only see one or two arrests a week, so we had to figure out how we were going to make all these connections and develop the infrastructure to do a couple of things: one, to score the public safety assessment. That is the tool that we're using in New Mexico to provide background investigation reports to judges, and to make sure they had all this information when they took the bench for that initial liberty hearing bond call, I think, is what Kentucky uses first appearance, and so we had to figure out, how are we going to make all this available in a way that we can afford to do it. 

And so, that’s where we got to work. And in New Mexico we've been working on implementing pretrial service programs since 2019 across the state, and this is supported by our Supreme Court as well as our legislature. And so in New Mexico we have 33 counties, and they're big, spacious counties, and those counties make up 13 judicial districts. So in a lot of places we were trying to do multi-county standups that fall within the same judicial district. And that gets interesting because when you have a judicial district that's four counties, you actually end up with really four different groups, stakeholder groups you're working with, and we'll get in to how we did that.

So, from the AOC side in 2019, the AOC created a pretrial justice program, and we've been doing a lot of work before AOC did that in Bernalillo County. And so we took a lot of what we did in Bernalillo County, really starting in 2014-15 through 2019. And our goal was really to scale it up statewide.

So the AOC Pretrial Justice Program was born in 2019. It started off with one employee, me, and very quickly. We brought on more employees. And so we do have a management team now of multiple statewide program managers. But we really started with a skeleton-type infrastructure. So our mission at the AOC is to foster enhance pretrial justice throughout New Mexico, and our vision is to be a national leader in pretrial justice. And we always operate from guiding principles as we're moving into new jurisdictions, working with stakeholders, in individual counties or judicial districts all the way up to the legislature, that we like this little quote from U.S. v. Salerno, that in society liberty is the norm, and detention prior to trial without trial is a carefully limited exception. So that's kind of how we like to set the tone as we're coming in to start working in a jurisdiction implementing legal and evidence-based practices. 

And, so, sometimes we have to start with the basics, because oftentimes people get confused about the part of the system that we're working in. And we, we're not working in a post-adjudicated system. We're working in the pretrial system. So a lot of this is education. So it's the presumption of innocent using least restrictive conditions to reasonably assure court appearance and public safety and preventive detention only used when no conditions can be applied to reasonably protect public safety. And this kind of goes with some huge legal changes that happened in New Mexico several years ago, with an opinion that came out from our Supreme Court, and it was written by retired Justice Daniels. And really it said, you shouldn't be using money. It's unconstitutional, and we need to use the least restrictive conditions. And we need to release people. And so that's really the framework that we've been moving with since that opinion came out. And since then our New Mexico Supreme Court, they completely rewrote their Supreme Court rules around what that's supposed to look like. And so it really put New Mexico in a place to have really good legal framework for pretrial reform in essence, and so in New Mexico money cannot be used. Only if it's addressing the issue of court appearance, and it can't be more than a defendant can make. Other than that the presumption is release unless the state files a motion for preventive detention, and they have, and those are on felony cases only, and they have to prove to be clear and convincing evidence that there are no set of conditions that exist for public safety. So we have an interesting framework. For the most part it's worked well with the work that we're trying to do with implementing legal and evidence-based practices.

So, this is kind of what our structure looks like at the AOC. We have the AOC, and within the AOC we have our background investigation and PSA Unit. And that is centralized. So that unit is doing background investigations and conducting the PSA for all the jurisdictions in the state that we're working with, and we're almost done. So we'll be fully implemented in the next year and a half. We have our afterhours electronic monitoring unit, which I will get into that provides after hours monitoring for the jurisdictions that choose to use electronic monitoring, and we do limit how much GPS can be used across the state.

We also develop the guidelines of how pretrial programs are going. The local programs are going to do supervision, how they're going to respond to violations, how they're going to really do everything, because our goal is to promote legal and evidence-based practices. We also have the standards. We provide intensive, remote on the ground training. So a huge part of us implementing programs and then sustaining programs is to really go out there and start educating everybody on what pretrial justice is, what it should look like, and what those best practices are.

We work hand-in-hand with local jurisdictions, with the implementation. So we like to work very closely with chief judges, with law enforcement, with the DA, the public defender, on the ground with them to help them put their programs together. And then, once a program is launched, really, the hard part is sustainability. How do we ensure the programs are staying in line with best practices? So we do a lot of work with that. We provide oversight, and we do a lot of auditing, we do auditing really, to ensure that the data that's going into our statewide court database, which is Odyssey, is good data, so that when we are pulling performance outcomes and metrics such as the public safety rate, court appearance rate, new violent criminal activity rates, all those rates, our data is good and it's accurate.

So, within that kind of bubble, in every jurisdiction, every county, part of implementation is to create a local stakeholder committee. And so those committees, initially, they're called implementation committees, and once a program has launched, they turn into oversight committees, and they have the district attorney, the public defender, the jail, law enforcement, behavioral health, victim advocates. Really, all the folks that touch the criminal justice system, and initially, those committees are meeting once a month during implementation, and once a program launches after the first year we move those meetings to every other month, and those meetings really turn into where we provide data, we identify areas that maybe that jurisdiction should look using the data improvements. We'd like to get feedback of some of the struggles those different agencies may be having, and how we can make that better, because our goal, everybody's goal in that stakeholder committee is to increase public safety and court appearance. So it's really a collaborative transparency group of people that are constantly working to identify what can we do better. That group also does system evaluations. So we look at court processes. We look at DA processes, we look at the processes to make sure are there efficiencies that can be found. Is there ways that we could do things better? 

And then it's all about data. So we're constantly bringing data back to the local jurisdictions to show them what their public safety rates are, to show them what their court appearance rates are, and identifying if there's dips. What could be causing that? Are there areas that we didn't think of that we need to go back and look at to see if there's something we can do better?  And then the local supervision, the pretrial supervision program, lives in each of those jurisdictions. And so each of those jurisdictions has a pretrial services program with a program manager or program coordinator and staff that is doing the supervision and the support of the defendants that go to those programs. They're communicating everything that's going on with those defendants to the DA, the judge, and the public defender. They're providing court date reminders. And they're trying to make as many community connections voluntarily for the defendants to help really promote their overall success while they're on pretrial.

So, on the AOC side, not the local programs, but the AOC side at pretrial we have 50 AOC employees. We have a Management Team, like I said, that is seven employees. And so they're skilled at all kinds of things. Everything from implementation, data, sustainability. All those types of things is what they focus in on. We also have our Background Investigation Unit. We call it our BI PSA unit, and it has 25 employees, and they operate seven days a week, 22 hours a day. There's an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening where we're kind of changing over the shifts. And so, and that program as we get as we finish out the state, we might have to add one or two folks to that unit. But we're always kind of looking at the workload and the numbers coming in to make those decisions.

We also have our Electronic Monitoring Unit. That is our afterhours unit that has 16 employees and they operate all the hours when the courts are closed, so they usually come in around 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and then we hand the monitoring back off to the local programs at around 8 o'clock in the morning. They also work Saturdays and Sundays and all holidays. and then something that we've kind of started. It's not new, but  we're finally getting it up and going, is we have a Remote Supervision Unit. And right now we have two employees in there, and those are pretrial officers. and we learned, as we were expanding throughout the state that we have some jurisdictions that are really small, and the only thing that was impeding us from launching their programs was people applying for those jobs. And so we've learned from other places around the country who were doing remote supervision that we could do remote supervision as well.

And so these two employees, they provide support to sites that we need to launch, and we start their supervision off remotely. They can also fill in the gaps to any of our local programs that maybe someone goes on sick leave or they have a vacancy. This group can pick up that caseload until that position is filled, and when we're not needing them for those reasons, they can also assist the local programs with pulling NCICs to do the regular criminal history checks.

So, our Background Investigation Unit. As I said, we have about 25 folks in there. And the way that works is part of our implementation whenever we go into a jurisdiction is we create really good relationships with the local folks. And so one of the first things we do is we reach out to the jails. And we have the local program manager who oversees the local programs, a part of every meeting we do because, I think Angie talked about, that importance to have those relationships, because otherwise it's kind of AOC just kind of coming in and telling everybody what to do. And that's not what we want. And that doesn't create buy-in.

But early on we start working with the jails, creating that relationship and working with them to see how we can embed some of our needs into their processes without creating more work for them. And so the way it works is when someone is arrested in New Mexico and they're brought into a local jail, that jail sends our Background Investigation and PSA Unit the booking information, the citations, the criminal complaints, whatever it may be, to our BI Unit through email. And those happen throughout the day, the night whatever. So it's become a part of their process flow. When our background investigation and PSA Unit gets that information, they then go into the statewide Odyssey database, and they initiate the case in Odyssey, and they start to pull the necessary information to first conduct the Background Investigation Report, using NCIC. We have two terminals that are set up, and then they do a complete criminal history check using our New Mexico database and NCIC. They create a fairly intensive, comprehensive background investigation report, and then they complete the PSA. Those two documents are then loaded back into the Odyssey system, so when the judge takes the bench, they can click on the case and have that information when they're making that initial liberty hearing.

So, this is kind of a picture to kind of show information coming into the BI Unit and information going back out. And we do have examples of the background investigation report. It's a standard report that we use. It includes the defendant's name. It includes who did that criminal history report so that the judge knows who that is, and we have really good communication with all the court managers around the state and judicial specialists who are in there kind of preparing stuff for the court before they take the bench, and we have pretty good relationship with the with the judges. They often will reach out to us if there's questions, or if they're waiting for something, because we, too, are working against schedules from all the different courts of when they're doing their first appearances. 

We primarily do the PSA and the background investigation report on people who have been arrested because our focus on is on release. But if someone who was summons in the court or they were somehow released without a hearing or something, which would be strange, if someone is ordered to pretrial supervision the pretrial program can reach out to us, and we will conduct the public safety assessment, because the public safety assessment in New Mexico is used to identify on what conditions of release should be, and who should be on supervision, and what level of supervision.

So, this is how many background investigation reports and PSAs have been completed by month up to June of 2024, and as we add the last remaining jurisdictions into launching, these numbers will continue to go up.

So, our EMS Unit, or EM Unit as we like to call it, that again is our afterhours Electronic Monitoring Unit. And I want to say by us having this unit, it doesn't mean that we're promoting or recommending GPS as a strategy for pretrial supervision. But it is a tool that can be used at times to monitor other conditions of release. And so we wanted to make sure that we were providing afterhours support for those rare times when there is an immediate situation that might require a bench warrant. We do require our jurisdictions, and we do have MLUs with each of our courts, really talking about what practices should look like, processes, that type of thing. And one of the things that we do have in the MLU is that no jurisdiction will have more than 10 percent of their supervised population on GPS, just because there hasn't been any research to date that we've seen that it shows a huge impact on the pretrial population when it comes to public safety or court appearance. And so we really try to explain to the courts and stakeholders that it is something that can be used. It needs to really be individualized for that individual and that individual’s circumstances.

So, this unit again, they work seven days, a week after hours. We have a supervisor, four leads, nine officers, and right now we have two positions frozen because we don't need them right now. But as this unit does expand to a few more places, we do think we'll need to increase their staffing.

So, on average in New Mexico we have 216 people across the state that are on GPS at any given time, and that number fluctuates as we add on more programs. We do have some counties that have decided not to use GPS because they're looking at the research and determining it may not be something that they need. It also takes a lot of resources from the local jurisdiction because they're providing that monitoring during the day. But if jurisdictions want to use it, we can definitely make that available. 

And so, the way that works is our EMS Unit, we, the courts, get to choose really what GPS vendor they're going to use. And so right now, I believe we have three different vendors that are used across the state. And so our EMS Unit has access to those web-based systems. And so when someone is on GPS, and there's some type of alert that comes through those alerts come through email to our EMS Unit, and so our staff then open up those alerts. They go into whatever system that defendant is GPS monitoring on, and they go and they investigate. Is this really a violation? Or is this someone who, there's some type of issue with the technology? Or are they going down the street that skirts up next to an exclusion zone? So we get tens of thousands of alerts. It's insane the number of alerts that we get, but most of them do not result in a true violation or a situation where we're requesting a bench warrant. 

So, from FY 23 to 24, these are the number of true violations that occurred that ended up in a bench warrant. In FY 23. we had 17, and FY 24 we had 151, and, as you can see, the majority of the violations we end up having to request a bench warrant on are for dead batteries. So again, it's something, a support, that we do provide to all of our jurisdictions. But when we ran the numbers out of all of the alerts that we get, it was less than one percent of those alerts that actually resulted in a need to request a bench warrant.

So, and then lastly, we have our Remote Supervision Unit that we're pretty excited about, and the slides are moving faster than I am, but they do…they provide remote support to our programs that allows us to launch those programs so that doesn't delay their launch. We can provide support when a local program is having a staffing issue or a vacancy issue, and then they can also provide extra support with doing criminal background checks for folks that are under supervision, and they also have been, most recently, helping to assist with our Q&A and our audit reports to ensure that our data is going in. And if there's data that's missing, that's then sent out to the local programs. And that's it for me. So I'm open for questions.

KRIS BRYANT: Thank you, Kelly. So we have a question about CJIS. “Do you have a statute that identifies your office as a criminal justice agency for the purposes of access to CJIS?”

KELLY BRADFORD: Yeah, so it's not a statute. So, our Department of Public Safety at the state level, they are the ones that control who can have access to CJIS NCIC and they get their regs from the FBI. So because we are an arm of the court, we have the Supreme Court, we have the Administrative Office of the Courts, and then we have the courts, we are considered a part of the group that can have access to NCIC. 

It's not easy to get, though. It did take us some time. But I think it was Mike that talked about all the things you have to have to meet FBI regs. And so we worked really hard to ensure our Background Investigation Unit and our EMS Unit are actually in a secondary enclosed area in our building here in Albuquerque, and so it's restricted access only for people who've done their fingerprints, who've done security training, and all of that to be able to access that area.

KRIS BRYANT: We have some more questions coming in. This first one is probably a more global question. “Are there any online virtual trainings or information on best practices for pretrial that counties can use to re-educate their stakeholders?”

KELLY BRADFORD: One hundred percent yes. That was something that we put together a couple of years ago. We're actually moving that online training over to a new online learning management system. But yes, we created several learning modules that talked about, one, the pretrial legal framework in New Mexico. What are legal and evidence-based practices? What does supervision look like really? The whole nine yards. And we do require all staff across the state when they're coming new into a pretrial program to go through that training. It requires questionnaires, that type of thing. We even have a whole hour of Tim Schnecky talking about the history of bail. He's great when he presents on that stuff. So that's a huge push because when we really started pretrial in New Mexico there wasn't a knowledge base. And so one of the goals that I had coming into the AOC is we needed to create a statewide knowledge base. Everyone from pretrial officers on the ground doing the work to judges that are making these release decisions. So we have worked really hard to expand everybody's understanding of what pretrial justice is. We send folks to training, judges, CEOs, Supreme Court justices. We had a Supreme Court justice at NAPSA this year in order to really get people to know what this is because it makes it a lot easier.

KRIS BRYANT: “Is that only available internally within New Mexico? Or are you making that available to the greater national audience? Those trainings?”

KELLY BRADFORD: So, if people want to see what our trainings look like in our modules, they are more than welcome to reach out. We have shared them with other jurisdictions, and many of the speakers in those trainings are actually national experts. So I had the opportunity to corner a whole bunch of people at a NAPSA conference a couple of years ago, and make them sit down and answer questions. And so we have everybody a part of those training modules.

KRIS BRYANT: “You all navigate the dynamics?” This is a great question. “How do you navigate the dynamics that often come from state level government mandating services locally?”

KELLY BRADFORD: That's a good question. To breath, number one. Count to three. It's really patience. It's knowing that changing your system, implementing new things. It's a long game. And so you just really have to be invested in it. You have to be patient. You have to understand that you may take five steps forward, and then maybe you get a new judge or a new stakeholder, and you kind of got to take a few steps back. Because it's hard work. Pretrial, we're instruments of change, and change is hard. You're doing a culture shift more than an adaptive change. And so it's really staying the course. It's being patient, it is going out and having those meetings with judges. doing it one on one, doing it one on one with legislators whenever you can, because you almost have to give little bits at a time rather than throwing it folks all at once.

KRIS BRYANT: There are a lot of relationship pieces in what you're talking about. Yeah.

KELLY BRADFORD: Absolutely.

KRIS BRYANT: So I see some of our listeners are moving into the capacity and the math part of this. So what is the capacity based on positions? Jodi is asking, “With 25 staff on the Investigations unit, roughly, how many pretrial report assessments are completed in a year?” However, you want to break down that number so that they understand.

KELLY BRADFORD: Yeah, in a year I'd have to go add up that bar chart that I showed you. But when we were trying to figure out capacity, one thing, because I reached out to Tara Blair, who is with Kentucky, because I knew that they had centralized some part of their functions. And the one thing we were going to do different is we were going to centralize the background investigation report and the PSA. And so I'd reached out and asked Tara, how many can your staff do in a shift? And so we started collecting that information to figure out how many, how many employees are we going to need to do this? And so right now, we're at 25. It really depends on their experience on the job. Someone who has been doing it for a while can do much more than someone who's new. And the background investigation report is what takes the longest. And it's really dependent on someone's criminal history. So a background investigation report can take 15 minutes, or it can take 45 minutes. So I think right now, for the most part, we're probably on average—and R.J. McBee is, I think, on here, so he's going to kill me if I'm wrong, he helped start that unit and oversees it—I think on average, we can do, probably between 15 and 18. But again, it really depends on what someone's criminal history is going to look like.

KRIS BRYANT: Definitely. We went through that remote supervision part kind of quickly. Going back to that, “Do the staff work remotely and take call-ins as they come in, or is there another process to connect defendants with the staff referring to services?”

KELLY BRADFORD: They absolutely do. So they're actually located down the hall from me. And so for that unit, and something we've been promoting throughout New Mexico and all of our programs, is remote reporting. So in all of our programs across the state the vast majority of folks are reporting. Defendants are reporting to the local programs remotely. Some do require twice a month in-person reporting with the rest being done remotely. But here, with our remote staff, it's 100 percent remote. So they schedule an appointment with a defendant. They send a link so that defendant can attend that remotely through a link or by phone. We are a big state and we don't have good reception everywhere. So sometimes those are done over the phone. But everything they do is remote.

KRIS BRYANT: The west. I see your question. I'm going to ask that we end on that question. So I'm going to come back to you. So before I get to that question, the next one is, a newer formed pretrial agency here, “How do you get your stakeholders to buy into the idea of pretrial working to release individuals from jail. Our judges don't want us to advocate for defendants to be released.”

KELLY BRADFORD: Yeah, and that's a tough one. And that's the reason why education, I think, is so important to start in the beginning. So I mean New Mexico is pretty far along the way, because we had New Mexico v. Brown, a Supreme Court opinion that came out and said we're going to go this way. We also had the legislature who really tasked AOC with implementing pretrial programs across the state. Now, we're in the news a lot, because not all of our leaders necessarily agree on release. But that's kind of where we sit right now. And so when we go in and start working with a jurisdiction, we go to the local CJCCs. It takes us about six to nine months before we can go live with a program because the first six months is really about educating folks. What is a pretrial outcome tool? What does it measure? What does it not measure? What is pretrial? What is probation? What has been shown to work through research, to work with your pretrial population? And so it takes a lot of time of layering the education and understanding on your stakeholder groups, and you're still going to have folks that aren't bought in. And so when that happens, if you can get one or two judges to kind of jump on board, then do it with them, and then compare the data with the judges that are doing the releases. Look at the outcomes and compare to the judges that aren't. Don't put their names next to it. They'll get upset, but then you can start to show them that this does work. And so we've done that recently, we can show our public safety rates, violent criminal activity rates and our court appearance rates pre-implementation and post-implementation.

Now, and across the board, you see an increase in public safety and court appearance. And so sometimes you have to be really patient and be, all right. And then come back around a year later and say, we piloted this here. This is what it looked like. So it like, I said, it's a long game. You have to be patient.

KRIS BRYANT: I’m going to ask each of you—we'll start with Kelly, then go to Angie, then to Mike—almost in closing, or in closing, would you answer for us, “Are your state structured under a judicial branch of government, and then feel free to give us your closing comments. So, Kelly, we'll start with you.

KELLY BRADFORD: Yes, the judiciary in New Mexico is a separate but equal branch of government, and we are a unified court system in New Mexico. So we operate under the Supreme Court. And so, what goes for one kind of goes from all. And we're also a court of rules. So most of the time changes that happen within the judicial system aren't necessarily done through legislation. They're done through Supreme Court rules.

KRIS BRYANT: Angie. 

ANGIE DARCY: We're the same in Kentucky. We are under the judicial branch. We're also a unified court system as well, and most of our…we do have some statutes because we were one of the first states to get rid of bail bondsmen. So we do have a lot of pretrial statutes. But a lot of ours are rule-based as well. 

KRIS BRYANT: Angie. Any closing words.

ANGIE DARCY: I think, just like Kelly said, it can be really tough. And you just have to be persistent. It's really about building a lot of the relationships with judges and giving them data and showing them consistently this is what the data shows. This is what our release outcomes are, and it's not all doom and gloom. And sometimes it's just about showing up all the time and being there and present so they know that you're not going away. And you're not hiding from data either.

KRIS BRYANT: Thank you, Angie. Alright, Mike.

MIKE FERRITER: Yes, Montana is under the Supreme Court, as I mentioned earlier. However, it's been helpful that we had a specific statute that gave us direction on how to organize what some of the expectations were. So that combination has been really helpful. It is helpful to work under the umbrella of the Supreme Court. It gives you some authority and direction that's been helpful.

In closing, there was a question about how to convince stakeholders. I think one of the key things for us, it's always public safety, right? It's always public safety. Well, what pretrial has really been helpful, I think, is getting the right people in jail and the right people out of jail. It's a resource. When I oversaw the Department of Corrections, we looked at prisons that way. We can't. We only have so many beds, so many resources. So I think what's been really helpful for us is to make sheriff’s detention staff aware that if we can release people pretrial, and you will have adequate state space for those individuals that that need to be detained and that aren't being held on a minimal bond because we do have bond or some other socioeconomic reason that people hold people in jail. So the key really is…it always boils down to public safety and money and space, and those kind of things. But, I think again, keeping the right people in jail and ensuring that those that can be successful out of custody are released. So, thank you.

KRIS BRYANT: Thank you, Mike. So hopefully, you took an opportunity to give us some feedback in the poll. We do use that information at BJA for additional webinars. As a reminder, there will be an email likely tomorrow to give you access to the recording, as well as the slides. Feel free to share this resource within your states within your networks. I do hope the attendees, that you will join me in applauding these three states, these three practitioners joining us today. They, as states, they truly are trailblazers. They are moving back the curtain and showing you how they have evolved in this practice, which is truly a new practice to the field. So thank you to the three of you. Attendees, thank you for showing up today for listening intently, and for your questions. Everyone have a wonderful day. Thank you.