Santa Fe, New Mexico
The Setting
New Mexico is a majority-rural state with 33 counties and significant variation in court capacity across jurisdictions. Before 2019, pretrial services were fragmented and inconsistently practiced. The New Mexico Administrative Office of the Courts launched its Pretrial Justice Program in 2019 with one staff member. Today the program includes 54 AOC employees operating centralized functions statewide, plus approximately 110 practitioners embedded in local judicial districts. All pretrial funding flows through the AOC, which reimburses local judicial districts for staff and operational costs. Local staff are employees of their respective judicial districts, preserving local accountability while ensuring consistent practice. The Public Safety Assessment is used across all jurisdictions, supported by a unified statewide court case management system that makes centralized support operationally possible.
The Challenge
How do you provide 30 rural courts with the same quality of pretrial services that a well-resourced urban court can build on its own? A rural court with one pretrial officer has no coverage when that person is out. A rural court that holds arraignments only Monday and Friday cannot provide the same around-the-clock background investigation capacity as a large urban jurisdiction. A rural program manager working alone cannot build the peer relationships that prevent professional isolation.
The rollout itself presented a second challenge. Going live with systems before stakeholders understood or accepted the program would produce compliance without engagement. The senior statewide program manager described the risk directly: the AOC could activate its case management system, its PSA tools, and its centralized units in any jurisdiction overnight. Three months later, nothing would be working correctly. Adaptive change requires a foundation, and that foundation requires time.
The Strategy
The AOC built four centralized units that handle functions no small rural program should have to staff locally. The centralized background investigation unit operates 22 hours a day, seven days a week, and serves every jurisdiction in the state. When a booking occurs at any detention center, the information is sent to this unit, which creates the case in the unified court management system, runs the background investigation, completes the Public Safety Assessment, and dockets the completed report so that the judge has it available at arraignment. For rural courts that hold arraignments only two or three days per week, this unit provides coverage and consistency that would be impossible to replicate locally.
The remote supervision unit provides remote pretrial supervision for any jurisdiction facing a staffing gap. When a rural program loses a staff member to leave, illness, or a vacancy, the remote unit steps in. Staff conduct video check-ins, monitor compliance, and report non-compliance to the court through the same processes a local officer would use. The unit also runs regular quality assurance reports across all jurisdictions, flagging cases where no contact notes appear after release. Those reports are sent to local programs as supportive alerts.
A centralized electronic monitoring unit handles after-hours monitoring for every defendant ordered to electronic monitoring in the state. Local programs monitor during business hours. The state unit monitors nights, weekends, and holidays. When a zone alert occurs at midnight, the unit contacts the defendant, then the alleged victim if needed, then law enforcement, and if necessary the on-call judge for that jurisdiction. The unit can complete the full warrant process without waking a local officer.
The Pretrial Executive Network, modeled after the National Institute of Corrections' network, brings together the program manager from each of the 13 judicial districts monthly. The meetings cover supervision practice, data entry, court relationships, and whatever questions individual program managers bring. The network functions as a peer support structure for what would otherwise be isolated local leaders. Program manager turnover has been minimal: two or three departures in three years across the entire network.
The rollout strategy has been as deliberate as the infrastructure itself. Over six years, the AOC moved jurisdiction by jurisdiction. When entering a new community, staff do not lead with systems. They start by acknowledging that they are outsiders and leaning on whoever has local credibility, whether that is a program manager from the community or a chief judge who has agreed to convene stakeholders. Monthly stakeholder meetings are required in the first year of implementation. Quarterly meetings are required after that, memorialized in a memorandum of understanding with each jurisdiction. Education and relationship-building come first. Systems follow.
“I could say we are going to go live in the fifth judicial district tomorrow and turn all these on. But it is not going to work if we do not start to lay that foundation with all those stakeholders first. You will find that three months down the road, nothing is being used or it is not being used correctly.”
— Senior Statewide Pretrial Program Manager, New Mexico AOC
What Made It Work
The unified court case management system is the infrastructure that makes everything else possible. Without a single system shared by every court in the state, the centralized background investigation unit could not docket reports directly into a defendant's case. The remote supervision unit could not monitor cases across jurisdictions. The quality assurance reporting function could not flag gaps in supervision statewide. The system is not a pretrial-specific tool; it is the statewide judiciary's case management platform. Pretrial services are built on top of it.
In rural communities where program managers may work in isolation and have limited exposure to peer practice, the state's case review process has been a meaningful source of professional support. When AOC staff work with a local jurisdiction, they focus on what the program is doing well and how to build on it. For rural program managers who may rarely interact with colleagues from other jurisdictions, that engagement provides both practical guidance and a connection to the broader statewide effort. Programs that have developed strong practices have become informal leaders within the Pretrial Executive Network, extending the state's support through peer relationships rather than top-down direction.
Remote contacts are an accepted and often preferred option in communities where in-person contact creates barriers that reduce engagement. The approach recognizes that rural programs operate in conditions that are not simply a scaled-down version of urban practice, and that what matters is the quality of the contact and the outcome for the client, not the method of delivery.
Considerations for Replication
States building statewide pretrial infrastructure should identify which functions benefit from centralization and which require local presence. Background investigations, after-hours electronic monitoring, and remote supervision backup share a common characteristic: they require consistent coverage across shift schedules and staffing gaps that no small local program can reliably maintain on its own. Building those functions at the state level frees local programs to focus on the relationships and court presence that cannot be done remotely.
The jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction rollout is slower than a simultaneous statewide launch and has produced better results. The foundation that makes a pretrial program work, which is stakeholder understanding, judicial buy-in, and local process alignment, cannot be built through a statewide policy memo. It is built through direct engagement, one jurisdiction at a time. States that skip the foundation work and launch systems first will find that the systems are technically operational and practically unused.
A peer network for local program managers has prevented the isolation that leads to drift, burnout, and turnover in New Mexico. A monthly convening of program managers across jurisdictions, with structured time for questions and cross-jurisdiction problem-solving, costs almost nothing and produces the kind of sustained engagement that strengthens local practice over time. The low turnover among New Mexico's program manager network is not accidental.
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.
New Mexico extends the same logic statewide: a centralized background investigation unit operating 22 hours a day, seven days a week, completes assessments and dockets reports for bookings anywhere in the state. A remote supervision unit steps in when a rural program loses its staff member to leave, illness, or vacancies.
Also under Strategy 3
Marquette County Community Corrections
Montana Office of the Court Administrator
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.