Pretrial System Improvements Supporting Materials

Multnomah County was awarded $2 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) in 2017 to implement strategies that address drivers of the local jail population, including unfair and ineffective practices that take a particularly heavy toll on people of color, low-income communities, and people with mental health and substance abuse issues. Since 2020, Multnomah County has been awarded an additional $3.66 million to focus on pretrial reform. As part of the SJC work, Justice System Partners (JSP) completed a pretrial system assessment, which identified efficiencies in the pretrial system and created recommendations for improvements to the pretrial system in Multnomah County.

In 2023, LPSCC launched the pretrial subcommittee to facilitate dialogue among pretrial system leadership in order to make policy decisions, troubleshoot operational challenges, monitor pretrial outcomes, and explore opportunities for system improvement. The group has primarily focused on improving pretrial monitoring, guided by the following overarching goals:

1. Increase successful court appearance
2. Decrease new arrests while on pretrial releasee
3. Increase stakeholder trust in the system

To help guide this work, LPSCC commissioned additional reports from Justice System Partners specifically focused on examining best practices in pretrial monitoring and our local system.