The Multnomah County Board of Commissioners heard updates Tuesday, Sept. 7 on the County’s continued work with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Safety + Justice Challenge (SJC) and the effort underway to rework the County’s pretrial system.
The MacArthur Foundation Safety + Justice Challenge launched in 2015 as an initiative to create “better, fairer, and more effective alternatives to excessive jail incarceration.”
Fifty-one cities and counties across the country comprise the Challenge Network of jurisdictions working to “change the way America thinks about and uses jail with particular focus on addressing disproportionate impact on low-income individuals and communities of color.”
Multnomah County was one of the first jurisdictions to join the challenge. And since 2019, much of that work has focused on revamping the County’s pretrial system or the proceedings and processes held before a case is disposed.
Tuesday’s briefing came two days before the County planned to file a Notice of Intent for a final sustainability grant application, the last in a series of grants for jurisdictions involved in the Challenge.
“With this application we are focusing specifically on a 40-year-old pretrial system that is out of date,” said Chair Deborah Kafoury, who opened the briefing.
“We are developing a pretrial system that is based on risk. We need to be data driven. This is especially important when it comes to reducing racial and ethnic disparities.
“Jail should not be a blunt instrument where we lock people up that we’re mad at, or people with behavioral health issues, or people who are homeless,'' she continued.
“Our current system is centered on holding individuals based on their charges and formerly, sometimes, gut feelings.”
If awarded, the grant funding would support Multnomah County’s work to build a risk-informed pretrial system that increases pretrial release and maximizes victim safety, public safety and court appearances, said Abbey Stamp, executive director of the Local Public Safety Coordinating Council.
Specifically, over the next two years, Multnomah County will leverage the funding to build on the work it has done so far by:
- Implementing the Public Safety Assessment (PSA), a pretrial risk assessment instrument that is administered to each individual who enters booking after law enforcement contact.
- Implementing an integrated risk-based supervision program or monitoring program to ensure defendants come back to court. Existing programs through Multnomah County’s Department of Community Justice (DCJ) Pretrial monitoring program and the Sheriff’s Office Close Street Supervision program would serve as part of a continuum rather than as siloed programs.
- Improving first court appearance processes for efficiency and equity.
- Establishing significant information technology infrastructure, including case management systems and data evaluation for accountability.
- Using the County’s Equity and Empowerment Lens to assess impacts on Black, Indigenous and other communities of color, and mitigate negative impacts.
- Developing a Community Academy in partnership with the Office of Community Involvement to create a cohort of community members to take part in policy decisions.
- Analyzing racial and ethnic disparities.
“The entire goal of pretrial work is to make sure if folks are not in jail before their case is disposed, that they come back to court successfully and they do not commit any more crimes in the community,” Stamp said.
Too much monitoring and not enough monitoring can both lead to bad outcomes, Stamp said.
“And allowing an individual to move back and forth between services is something we’ve never done before.”
These actions are also focused on reducing racial and ethnic disparities and maintaining a reduced jail population, which has already seen a reduction because of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Stamp.
The project is only possible through collaboration with key partners, speakers stressed, including the Oregon Judicial Department (OJD) Multnomah County’s Department of Community Justice (DCJ) Metropolitan Public Defender and Multnomah Defenders Inc., the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) District Attorney’s Office, the Local Public Safety Coordinating Council, and victims’ advocates.
Work groups, with those key partners, were formed to help guide the work.
Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office
Stephanie Lacarrubba, a program manager with the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, described the work underway with managers to align pretrial goals and practice in the Sheriff’s Office Closed Street program and DCJ’s Pretrial Release Services, both programs provide monitoring of defendants once released ahead of trial.
“Together, we’ve come up with draft frameworks to help inform release decisions made by the court and to help inform decisions made by pretrial officers,” said Lacarrubba.
“We’re still getting input through our bigger pretrial operations work groups, but hope to have them implemented as soon as the Public Safety Assessment is ready to go.”
Research shows over-supervision produces worse outcomes for individuals who don’t pose a high risk for failing to appear or committing a new offense.
The system is moving away from a probation or parole model and “toward a system that presumes release with the least restrictions necessary to ensure court appearance and public safety,” Lacarrubba said.
And it’s moving toward support rather than enforcement.
“We’ve made some strides in providing more service connections to current pretrial clients. Closed Street has a counselor that can work one-on-one to assist clients with complex social service needs. And both agencies can refer clients to housing and services at Flip the Script,” a reentry program administered by Central City Concern that focuses on African American individuals exiting incarceration.
Metropolitan Public Defender
Grant Hartley, director of the Multnomah County Metropolitan Public Defender office, lauded efforts to improve the first court appearance, or arraignment, process for defendants facing charges.
The arraignment is the first opportunity for the court to decide whether someone should be held or released.
“And currently, there’s unfair weight on one side,” Hartley stressed. “Prosecutors come in with full information with police reports and investigation documents. Defense attorneys whisper to clients in order to get information about release.”
The judge makes their decision based on information provided by the district attorney and defense attorney.
“It’s not good for defendants; it results in many releasable defendants being detained. It’s also not good for the community or the court, as judges may release people that they otherwise should not and detain individuals they otherwise should not,” he told the board.
Multnomah County’s pretrial work includes restructuring the process to give defense attorneys an opportunity to have meaningful, confidential communications with clients prior to the hearing, said Hartley.
“So when it comes to release decisions, both sides are adequately prepared and have information to provide the court as far as structure in the community,” he said.
Studies have found that defendants held pretrial are 25 percent more likely to be found guilty than not guilty, Hartley said. He cited a Portland State University study that found that those who were detained pretrial were also twice as likely to receive a sentence of incarceration.
“It tends to disrupt the exact structure and stability that the criminal legal system seeks to impart on these individuals. It costs people's jobs, housing, interrupts social benefits, [and] destabilizes family structure, which is critical to support people as they proceed through the criminal legal system.”
Restructured arraignment dockets would allow defense attorneys time to work with defendants time to “conduct follow-up investigations… to set up services and work with pretrial monitoring agencies to make sure that when they are released, they’re released to a supportive environment,” Hartley said.
“As Chair Kafoury mentioned, jail is a blunt tool and in order to sharpen it and make it more accurate, we need more information. This proposed restructuring is designed to do just that.”
Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office
“This is what I would call good, hard work,” said Jeff Howes, a Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney.
“Like a lot of work we do together, we get it done by listening to each other. And finding areas in which we agree with each other.”
Providing support for victims of crime is among the District Attorney's Office highest priorities, often in partnership with Oregon Crime Victim Law Center.
“As traumatizing as contact with the criminal justice system is for anyone, when you think about it from the perspective of a victim of a violent crime, that compounds exponentially,” Howes said.
“So when we talk about the reforms, we’re considering the victims’ perspectives. We always remember to support the victims and the support they need in a trauma informed way.”
Howes also noted that while pretrial reform and release decisions often concern low-level misdemeanor or felony charges, more serious and violent crimes must be considered, too, especially as the community experiences a surge in gun violence.
“Homicides come with special restrictions to pretrial release. But a lot of this is inter-connected and we’ve got to make decisions based on public safety, and we are doing just that," said Howes.
I heard someone describe the process as a better sort Howes said, ‘“We want to create a system that does a better sort so we don’t keep the wrong people in custody unnecessarily while releasing people who pose a greater risk to their victims or other victims of crime.’”
Oregon Judicial Department
“I’ve been involved in this project in one fashion or another for five years,” said Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Kathleen Dailey.
“It’s a sea change. It takes a lot of time and effort. And you’re hearing the depth of how vested all the partners are in this process — with an eye toward fidelity to the U.S. Constitution.”
In the concept of pretrial release, Dailey explained, people are presumed innocent and their release should be the presumption, with considerations for the likelihood the defendant will return to court for their hearing or commit new criminal activity in the community.
“Can we release with the least restrictive conditions and ensure that there is monitoring while in the community that meets the needs of community safety?”
Efforts to educate stakeholders about the forthcoming system changes are also underway among Oregon Judicial Department staff, said fellow Circuit Court Judge Cheryl Albrecht.
It’s no easy feat. Still, work persists alongside the Domestic Violence Pretrial Safety Committee, Albrecht said, “which is serving as a source of information and expertise for any domestic violence related aspect and the changes that we’re making.”
“We’re working to bring that aspect in, so people understand what their needs are and how the assessment development of the process will work for them.”
Department of Community Justice
Jay Scroggin, Adult Services Division Director for Multnomah County’s Department of Community Justice thanked the department’s pretrial team, which has worked, and continues to work, on reform efforts. The team helped test the feasibility of the Public Safety Assessment.
A retrospective study of 2,400 defendants compared the pretrial risk score they received through the existing Virginia Risk Assessment tool with the score that they would have received through the proposed Public Safety Assessment “to make sure that the PSA tool makes sense and to get an idea of how a desired system might work,” speakers said.
The PSA is an actuarial assessment that works to predict the risk of failure to appear in court pretrial and new criminal activity while on pretrial release.
“It’s exciting that we’re going from a 40-year practice and moving to where the vast majority of defendants are releasable,” said Scroggin.
“This PSA tool helps set a roadmap for what monitoring conditions they will have and where we will release them too.”
The work has also allowed for greater collaboration with the Sheriff’s Office, he said.
“We believe this is an opportunity to maximize resources that both individual agencies bring,” said Scroggin. “They bring sworn staff that can do home visits for some of the higher-risk people when needed. And our staff handles some of the more moderate-risk people.”
The reform work will move toward automating the PSA as much as possible and supporting a new case management system for DCJ’s Recognizance Unit.
“They are working to build an IT system where all systems talk,” said Scroggin. “It follows the defendant from start to finish through the court journey. And we hope that this system gives the users what they need to do with case management.”
Scroggin said that the new IT system is being designed to also provide real-time data.
“We have shown that we are a system that will shift when we have data,” said Scroggin. “We are a data-driven county. An IT system gets us there.”
The final application for the MacArthur Foundation Safety + Justice Challenge is due on Sept. 24, 2021.
Watch full board meeting here