This report presents the features and impact of Phases I and II of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative for Yamhill County, Oregon.
The county's JRI Policy Team decided to focus its Phase I JRI efforts on the pretrial component of its justice system, concluding that this focus would result in the most cost reduction by reducing the jail population. During Phase I, JRI technical assistance providers assisted Yamhill County officials in developing a work plan and timeline for the redesign of the county's pretrial processes to reflect evidence-based practices. Phase I activities included the selection of a risk assessment tool to guide pretrial release decisionmaking, guidelines for pretrial supervision based on risk level, develop pretrial jail inmate data, improve pretrial data collection, engage a full-time pretrial services officer to be responsible for assessing defendants and formulating release recommendations, and develop a formal release recommendation report for the court. In Phase II of the JRI, the county declined the opportunity for Phase II funding, but requested and received Phase II technical and research assistance in implementing the pretrial improvement efforts of Phase I. In Phase II, a pretrial processing decision matrix and accompanying data collection system were developed. The Oregon Public Safety Checklist was selected as the assessment tool for pretrial decisionmaking. It is a fully automated, actuarial assessment of risk developed and normed on a large sample of justice-involved persons in Oregon. The most recent local data has shown that Yamhill county has reduced its pretrial jail population by about 20 percent, and data for the first quarter of 2016 showed a failure-to-appear rate of only 2.7 percent