Helena, Montana
The Setting
Montana is among the most geographically expansive and sparsely populated states in the country. With just over one million residents spread across 56 counties and an area roughly three times the size of Illinois, most Montana counties do not generate enough daily bookings to justify a dedicated PSA function on their own. Centralizing the function at the state level creates an economy of scale that individual counties cannot replicate, while freeing local case managers to focus on what only they can do: direct client contact, monitoring, and community coordination. The program currently operates in seven counties, ranging from Yellowstone County at approximately 170,000 residents to Big Horn County at roughly 12,000, with Missoula, Lewis and Clark, Butte Silver Bow, Lake, and Cascade counties between them.
The program launched in 2018 via the Montana Legislature on a year-by-year basis and was recently moved from pilot status into the court administrator's base budget, a milestone that reflects sustained legislative confidence in the model. All seven counties use the Public Safety Assessment. Three processors (one full time and two part time) operate out of a state office in Helena, supported by a part-time program manager who oversees operations, data, and stakeholder engagement.
The Challenge
Assessments need to reach the judge two hours before each defendant's first appearance, which means reliable coverage is required every day a court calendar runs, regardless of staff illness, leave, or competing demands. For a single-person county program, that coverage requirement is unmanageable. Multiply it by the expectation of consistent accuracy across every case, and the investment required to build and maintain local capacity becomes difficult to justify at low volume and coverage becomes an issue.
The Strategy
The Montana OCA placed a three-person (one full time and two part time) processing unit in Helena that handles PSAs for all seven participating counties. Since 2018, the unit has completed more than 40,000 assessments. In seven years of operation, there have been very few challenges about PSA accuracy or timeliness in receiving the PSA by stakeholders. That record is the direct product of centralization: the same small expert team processes every assessment, day after day, developing a depth of familiarity with the tool and the local court context that a distributed, part-time local function cannot replicate.
Booking slips arrive electronically from county jails. Processors run the assessment, produce a one-page report showing PSA scores alongside outcome percentages from the state's pretrial release guide, and upload it to the shared case management system. The report is available to judges, prosecutors, and public defenders two hours before each defendant's scheduled appearance. The unit operates six days a week, starting as early as 5:45 a.m.
Each participating county enters a formal interagency agreement with the state. The agreement requires counties to designate a case manager, use the shared platform, and participate in annual stakeholder meetings. Beyond that, it is deliberately non-directive. Counties decide how to structure case management and monitoring. The state provides assessment infrastructure; the county determines what happens after.
“The centralized assessment part is what other states can easily do. That is supportive of their rural communities and helps spread the efficiencies in public safety that should be happening out of pretrial.”
— Pretrial Program Manager, Montana Office of the Court Administrator
What Made It Work
Consistency is the product that centralization delivers, and consistency is what makes a risk assessment tool credible to judges. That credibility took time to build and is rooted entirely in the team's depth of experience with the tool. Staff stability has made it possible: the processors have been with the program since its early years, and their familiarity with the tool, the counties, and the local case managers has compounded into an institutional knowledge base that cannot be replaced quickly.
The shared case management platform creates consistent data infrastructure across all seven counties, making the program's quarterly comparison reports possible. Those reports track court appearance rates, case outcomes, and detention patterns by risk level, including county-to-county variation in practice. When the data surfaces a pattern worth examining, the program manager brings it to the monthly case manager meeting as a direct conversation about practice. The data is used in three ways: with the legislature, with county-level stakeholders, and with individual case managers.
Considerations for Replication
The case for centralizing assessment processing is strongest where individual counties lack the booking volume to sustain a consistent, well-staffed local function. The test is not population size but daily booking volume and the realistic cost of staffing reliable coverage at that volume.
The interagency agreement should specify what the state provides, what counties must do to participate, and what counties are free to decide for themselves. The Montana model's restraint on the monitoring and case management side, requiring platform use and case manager designation while leaving local design to counties, has preserved buy-in across jurisdictions that would have resisted a more prescriptive approach. Stakeholder engagement requirements built into the agreement sustain relationships and surface problems before they affect program performance.
In the summary brief
Explore the use of regional or centralized service models to make pretrial services viable where a single county cannot sustain them.
Montana centralized PSA processing in a three-person unit in Helena that serves all seven participating counties: booking slips arrive electronically, and a one-page report reaches the judge two hours before each scheduled appearance. Since 2018, the unit has completed more than 40,000 assessments, building a level of accuracy and judicial credibility that no low-volume county could sustain on its own.
Also under Strategy 3
Marquette County Community Corrections
New Mexico Administrative Office of the Courts
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.