Salem, Oregon
The Setting
Oregon is geographically dominated by rural communities, with urban population concentrated along the I-5 corridor from Portland to Eugene. The Oregon Judicial Department oversees a statewide release assistance officer (RAO) program that expanded significantly following Senate Bill 48 in 2021, which replaced security schedules with chief justice order release guidelines and prompted a wave of investment in pretrial positions. By 2024, every county had release assistance officer staffing, a statewide case management system, published data standards, and a program manual. Rural counties, which had the least infrastructure before the expansion, have been among the strongest performers in meeting those data standards.
The Challenge
Scaling pretrial infrastructure to rural communities required confronting two problems simultaneously. First, population-based staffing formulas would have produced single-staff programs in small counties, creating conflict-of-interest coverage gaps whenever the only officer had a personal connection to a defendant. Second, introducing state-mandated positions into communities with strong local identity and resistance to state-driven policy required a strategy that centered local relationships rather than state authority.
The Strategy
The Oregon Judicial Department is working toward a minimum of two release assistance officers per county, regardless of population size. The rationale is conflict coverage: in small communities where everyone knows each other, a single officer will regularly encounter situations requiring a colleague to step in. While that standard has not yet been fully established at the statewide level, it reflects the direction of the program and the recognized need in rural counties, where a single-person program cannot sustain the capacity for case management and community partnership work that effective pretrial services requires.
In communities with resistance to new pretrial positions, release assistance officers were introduced in information-only mode. Rather than making recommendations on release, they provided the court with criminal history, failure-to-appear history, community ties, and transportation availability. That posture, neutral information rather than recommendation, reduced friction and gave courts time to develop trust in the RAO function before the recommendation role was introduced.
A statewide case management system and published data standards created a common measurement framework across all 36 counties. A statewide data dashboard allows every court to see its own outcomes alongside those of peer jurisdictions. That comparison generates curiosity and improvement without requiring any centralized mandate. Courts ask each other how they achieved their results. Release rates and failure-to-appear rates become topics of regional conversation rather than isolated local statistics.
A rural cell provider incompatibility discovered after statewide rollout of an automated check-in system illustrates a lesson the state now applies proactively: any technology tested in urban environments must be specifically tested in rural ones before deployment, because rural clients often have only one cell provider option and that option may not be supported.
“We need to understand that just because there's a smaller population, that doesn't mean that everything just scales down. There's a certain point where you just need infrastructure, and it costs what it costs.”
— Statewide pretrial administrator, Oregon
What Made It Work
Building from the ground up, rather than scaling down from an urban model, was a policy decision as much as a design decision. Communities with strong local identity resist programs perceived as urban impositions. Framing each county's RAO as a local court employee rather than a state agent, and giving communities local control over implementation details, reduced the political friction that typically accompanies statewide program expansion.
Regional communication among release assistance officers, facilitated through statewide Teams channels and regional group chats, provides the peer support network that isolated rural practitioners need. The statewide system means that any officer can reach a colleague across the state with a question or a difficult case. That network function is built into the structure, not dependent on any individual's initiative.
Considerations for Replication
States considering statewide pretrial expansion should work toward minimum staffing levels that reflect rural operational realities, not just population ratios. Single-staff rural programs are fragile. Two-person minimums for conflict coverage and coverage during leave address a structural vulnerability that smaller programs cannot solve on their own.
Starting new programs in information-only mode in resistant communities is a sequencing strategy, not a permanent limitation. Once courts see the value of the information the RAO provides, the pathway to recommendations opens naturally.
Statewide dashboards that enable peer comparison among courts drive improvement more effectively than top-down mandates. Courts respond to curiosity about their peers. Visibility into the data, not pressure from the state, is the mechanism.
In the summary brief
Present data in terms that judges, sheriffs, and county leaders need in order to make decisions.
Oregon’s statewide internal data dashboard allows each circuit court to view its release rates, court appearance rates, caseloads, and staffing levels by county or judicial district alongside those of peer jurisdictions. The comparison itself drives improvement without any centralized mandate: courts are able to engage with each other to garner lessons learned.
Also under Strategy 4
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.