Statewide nonprofit, Maine
The Setting
Maine is one of the most rural states in the country, with 16 counties covering a vast geographic expanse. Four centers, Portland, Lewiston, Augusta, and Bangor, function as semi-urban service hubs. Everything outside of those areas is rural. Court for pretrial detainees is held statewide on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
Maine Pretrial Services is an independent nonprofit that has operated in the state since the 1970s, beginning as a bail fund in Portland and expanding over decades into a statewide organization. The agency currently holds pretrial service contracts with nine of Maine's 16 counties. The nonprofit's model is distinctive: it is not required to accept every case, conducts in-person interviews as a deliberate practice to establish connection and trust with clients before supervision begins, and has pursued and maintained national accreditation. Consistency of practice across all nine counties is a deliberate organizational priority.
The Challenge
Rural pretrial programs in Maine face two intersecting structural challenges that urban programs do not. The first is staffing: many rural counties are single-person operations, and the statewide court schedule means coverage is required every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday regardless of illness, leave, or family emergency. The second is geographic isolation: a staff member covering a rural county may be two hours from the nearest colleague, responsible for court three days per week, and navigating a resource landscape that requires creative problem-solving on behalf of nearly every client.
The Strategy
The most distinctive feature of Maine Pretrial Services' rural operations is a coverage culture that developed organically among staff and has never required a formal policy to sustain. Because single-person rural programs must maintain court coverage three days per week without exception, staff have built a cross-county mutual aid system entirely on their own initiative. Staff in different counties coordinate their schedules months in advance, aligning PTO, maternity leaves, and family obligations so that gaps can be covered before they open. The system has no written policy or mandate. It exists because staff understand that their rural colleagues cannot fail to cover court, and they act on that understanding. The organization has identified protecting this culture as a leadership priority, recognizing that organizational culture in rural programs is often the infrastructure.
For resource navigation in rural counties, Maine Pretrial Services works closely with the OPTIONS liaison network, a statewide system of peer professionals funded largely through opioid settlement dollars. Every county has at least one OPTIONS liaison, and many rural counties now have two or three. These liaisons are state employees and often peer professionals who help any resident connect to any service, not only substance use services. For rural programs with limited local resources, the OPTIONS network provides statewide resource navigation infrastructure that staff can access for clients across the state.
Maine Pretrial Services hosts regularly occurring regional case reviews that bring together staff from multiple counties to review in-custody lists before court. Implemented several years ago, the model addresses two challenges specific to rural pretrial. First, some individuals served by the program appear as detainees across multiple counties, and regional reviews ensure that staff across those counties have shared awareness of a person's history, circumstances, and prior contacts. Second, rural court lists are often small, which limits the hands-on learning opportunities available to any single staff member working alone. Cross-county case reviews amplify that learning: staff see and learn from colleagues' cases during pre-court review, building shared knowledge and supervisory skill that isolated single-county practice cannot develop at the same rate.
In rural counties where court sits only a few times each month, the risk of a detained client being overlooked between hearings is real. Sequential bail review addresses that risk directly. Formalized with database infrastructure, policy, and defined time intervals through a two-year technical assistance engagement, the system ensures that no pretrial detainee in any served county goes untracked. Staff maintain current lists of everyone held pretrial in every jail they serve, check those lists on a defined schedule, and push information back out to the court and parties when circumstances change.
“I've never seen anything like our culture. It's a beautiful environment to work in.”
— Executive director, Maine Pretrial Services
What Made It Work
The staff coverage culture works because the organization has hired people who understand the mission and identify with their colleagues' constraints. Staff cover for each other not because they are required to but because they know what it means to be the only person responsible for court in a county where the next nearest colleague is two hours away. That shared understanding is built through cross-county communication, transparency about personal needs, and leadership that has treated the dynamic as something worth protecting. The OPTIONS liaison network extends that same principle outward: when a client has a need that local resources cannot meet, staff know which liaison covers that area and how to reach them, a working knowledge developed through years of community presence and cross-county collaboration.
The sequential bail review system works because it was formalized at the right moment. In rural jails that may hold only a handful of pretrial detainees at a time, a person can wait weeks between hearings with no one tracking whether their circumstances have changed. Formalizing the review practice through a structured technical assistance engagement gave it a database, a policy, and defined accountability intervals that could survive staff turnover and organizational change. The formalization did not change the practice; it made the practice durable.
Considerations for Replication
The staff coverage culture Maine Pretrial Services has built cannot be mandated into existence. It grows from hiring people who identify with the mission, creating conditions where staff communicate openly about needs and constraints, and treating mutual aid as an organizational value. Programs that want this kind of culture should examine whether staff in different locations have regular contact with each other and whether leadership treats coverage as a shared responsibility.
Regional case reviews are replicable by any multi-county or statewide program with minimal infrastructure. The primary requirement is a scheduled time for staff across counties to review in-custody lists together before court. Programs serving clients who move across county lines benefit most directly, since shared familiarity with those individuals improves the quality of each interaction. Programs whose rural staff have small caseloads benefit from the learning dimension: reviewing cases alongside colleagues multiplies the breadth of practice exposure that isolated rural staff would otherwise develop only over years.
Sequential bail review is a standard that every rural program can meet, even without sophisticated data infrastructure. In rural counties where court sits infrequently and a single missed hearing can mean weeks of additional pretrial detention, knowing who is in the jail and following up consistently is not a secondary task. It is the core of the work. The practice requires nothing more than a staff member who maintains the list and follows up when something changes.
In the summary brief
Meet behavioral health needs at the pretrial stage through relevant collaboration.
The statewide nonprofit works closely with the OPTIONS liaison network, a system of peer professionals funded largely through opioid settlement dollars. Every county has at least one liaison who helps any resident connect to any service. For rural programs with limited local resources, the network provides statewide navigation infrastructure that no county program could build alone.
Also under Strategy 7
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.