Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin
The Setting
Chippewa County is a rural county of approximately 66,000 people in northern Wisconsin, about 90 minutes from Minneapolis. The county seat, Chippewa Falls, is the largest community with roughly 14,000 residents; the rest of the county is made up of 11 villages and townships spread across more than 1,000 square miles. Seven law enforcement jurisdictions operate within the county, all served by a single dispatch center. Three judges share a rotating calendar covering all criminal, civil, family, and juvenile cases.
The Criminal Justice Services Division sits within the county's Department of Administration and houses five programs: pretrial, a Front End Intervention Treatment program, a First Time Offender program, a recovery court, and a developing reentry program. Four full-time staff and one part-time employee work across all programs, with one staff member dedicated primarily to pretrial. Pretrial launched in 2020 as part of a statewide pilot connected to the Evidence-Based Decision Making (EBDM) initiative through the National Institute of Corrections, building on infrastructure the county had developed since 2012 through its Criminal Justice Collaborating Council (CJCC).
The Challenge
Like most rural programs, Chippewa County's pretrial program serves a population where transportation, phone access, and housing instability are the dominant barriers to compliance. Co-occurring substance use and mental health needs are common, and the county had a history of the same individuals cycling through the system repeatedly. Before pretrial, the tools available were limited: hold someone or release them with little support and no structure. The CJCC's system mapping work, conducted as part of the EBDM initiative, identified pretrial as one of the highest-leverage points for change.
The Strategy
Chippewa County is one of a few counties in Wisconsin where the pretrial program engages in a bond hearing the morning after arrest, before the case has been formally entered into Wisconsin Circuit Court Access, the statewide public case tracking system. At this hearing, a judge and a public defender are both present. The hearing focuses solely on release or detention. Because the case has not yet been entered into the public record, individuals who are appropriate for diversion can be redirected without a permanent entry on their record.
The program uses the Public Safety Assessment, as do all Wisconsin pretrial pilot counties, guided by a statewide operational matrix developed collaboratively by the pilot counties. Contacts are conducted by phone, text, or email based on client circumstances, a practice retained from COVID that has improved engagement. In-person contact is reserved for clients who are not completing their check-ins.
The division deliberately uses the term monitoring rather than supervision, and staff are trained on the distinction. Drug testing is minimal by design: testing without access to treatment is counterproductive, and the program works to connect people to services voluntarily. For clients in rural areas who cannot travel to the courthouse, the program has partnered with local law enforcement to allow testing at the nearest agency rather than requiring a long trip.
“Having those small wins along the way gained the confidence of the board. It is starting to filter down through other stakeholders, even the district attorney's office. Diversion is becoming part of our culture in Chippewa County. This is the way it works.”
— Criminal justice services director, Chippewa County
What Made It Work
The CJCC and EBDM infrastructure preceded pretrial by nearly a decade and made everything else possible. The county was accepted into the national CJCC network and participated in NIC's EBDM initiative. System mapping through that process identified pretrial as a priority change area before any pretrial program existed. By the time Wisconsin launched its pretrial pilot, Chippewa County already had the stakeholder alignment, the shared understanding of evidence-based practice, and the governance structures that other counties were still trying to build.
The director's approach to law enforcement relationships reflects the operational reality of rural pretrial. She meets with every law enforcement jurisdiction at least twice a year, scheduling sessions around shift schedules including early morning and late evening. The sheriff's office does weekend drug testing for the program as a result of that relationship. Warrants are significantly down compared to before pretrial began, and the CJCC continues to meet quarterly in person with the same stakeholder group that has been working together for more than a decade.
Considerations for Replication
The bond-before-initial-appearance model requires judicial leadership and shared understanding among prosecutors, defense, and the bench. For counties where the case enters the public record at or before arraignment, the diversion window the model creates does not exist. Programs considering this approach should understand their state's court entry practices and whether a pre-entry hearing is legally and operationally feasible.
Building the collaborative infrastructure before launching pretrial is not optional. The right stakeholders, educated in evidence-based practice and aligned on purpose, are a precondition for pretrial, not an outcome of it. The CJCC came eight years before pretrial in Chippewa County. The monitoring philosophy and flexible contact model, by contrast, are replicable immediately: defaulting to phone and text, training staff on the monitoring distinction, and partnering with local law enforcement for rural access are operational decisions any program can make without special infrastructure.
In the summary brief
Introduce new practices as time-limited pilots with defined outcomes, then expand based on the evidence.
The pretrial program established a bond hearing held the morning after arrest, with a judge and public defender present, roughly six weeks before the standard initial appearance would otherwise occur. The hearing addresses release or detention only, and because the case has not yet been entered into the state’s public case tracking system, it preserves a diversion window that closes once a case enters the record. The county credits the pretrial program, including this early hearing structure, with declines in failure-to-appear rates and warrants and with sustained support among prosecution, defense, and CJCC stakeholders.
Also under Strategy 5
This project was supported by Grant No. 15PBJA-22-GK-03661-JAGT awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Office for Victims of Crime, and the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.