Thursday, November 6, 2025
Thurston County has completed a five-year study on its pretrial system, revealing data that could force a reevaluation of current pretrial release, detention and risk assessment policies throughout the county’s jurisdiction.
The pretrial study was launched in July 2019 and completed in December 2024. It was part of a national research program funded by Arnold Ventures.
The project examined who was detained, who was released, and what happened after a person was released.
According to Arnold Ventures, the pretrial study in Thurston County examined how the county decides who is released and what conditions are imposed before trial.
Researchers reviewed data and met with judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys to find gaps in the system. The study helps officials use facts, not assumptions, to improve pretrial decisions.
“We were one of a very few Research Action sites that were selected for this project,” said Superior Court Judge Christine Schaller during the Thurston County Board of County Commissioners (BoCC) work session on Wednesday, Feb. 19.
County officials confirmed the findings will influence new policies and replace assumption-based decisions with fact-supported assessments.
Schaller also shared, “It was funded by Arnold Ventures, and we had incredible technical assistance.”
Officials said they traced every stage of the pretrial system, identifying problem areas, contradictions and overlooked policy consequences.
Before the study, county officials stated there was no coordinated method for recording pretrial cases.
“Everyone in the justice system goes through the pretrial system, and I think as a community, we knew very little about what that looked like,” said Pretrial Services Director Carrie Hennen.
Public Defense Director Patrick O’Connor confirmed the pretrial system previously lacked data to measure effectiveness or identify issues. He noted the project’s target was to build a system that allows officials to assess outcomes.
“Prior to this project, we had no data. So, like any system where you’re judging or trying to assess the effectiveness of the system or areas of improvement, this critical portion of the justice system had no data for us to ask those questions or to assess effectiveness, failures, successes, etc.” O’Connor said.
Hennen added, “What were the types of decisions being made at the preliminary appearance? What were the outcomes during that pretrial period?”
The study produced an interactive data dashboard that now tracks risk levels, release conditions, failure-to-appear rates and re-offense rates.
“I was able to go into the data and say, ‘Well, it doesn’t always happen. It only happens 27% of the time,’ and it’s really empowering to be able to actually sort of respond to perceptions and anecdote with cold, hard numbers.” Hennen said.
She also countered the common belief that pretrial release leads to frequent new crimes.
Officials also found inconsistencies in how different types of cases are handled. The justice officials expect the findings may push for changes in judicial training, risk evaluation and pretrial policy development.
“We’re not trying to tell a story. Data is data,” Schaller said.
She added, “That’s the problem, right? We have these little anecdotes, these little stories that people like to (grasp) onto and act as if that is representative of what is happening in our pretrial system, and that is not what is happening.”
The research is complete, but officials now face the task of explaining the study’s findings to the public.
“There’s been some community questions about the program, and so now that the data is coming out, how do we tell that story?" asked BoCC Commissioner Carolina Mejia.
Hennen admitted the amount of data is overwhelming, making it difficult to create an easy and digestible public message.
“We now have all this information. So, what is the story within there?” Hennen said. “We need a cheat sheet. And now we need sort of a cheat sheet to the cheat sheet.”
Even with new insights, differences in data collection across agencies continue to create inconsistencies.
“I worry that if it says that we had 2,000 cases in 2025, and (Prosecutor) Jon (Tunheim) says we had 2,500 cases, and Sheriff (Derek) Sanders says we had 1,900, then the newspaper is going to say, ‘Thurston County doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about,’” said BoCC Commissioner Rachel Grant.
To address this concern, officials say they will need to standardize reporting methods to prevent misinterpretation of statistics by the media and public.
As part of their move to improve accuracy, Schaller shared that officials held two, half-day retreats to assess the project’s progress and discuss its direction after technical assistance ended.
Beyond data inconsistencies, officials are also evaluating gaps in risk assessment.
The Public Safety Assessment (PSA) tool is widely used for risk evaluation, but officials note it does not measure lethality in domestic violence cases. Judges say this leaves dangerous offenders undetected.
“The public safety assessment is validated across every type of case, so that includes domestic violence and inter-partner violence cases,” Schaller said.
“But it doesn’t address lethality, and that is something that the judges were very strong about.”
To resolve the gaps, officials are now working to implement the Danger Assessment Law Enforcement (DA-LE) tool, which will provide a more precise method for evaluating threats in domestic violence cases.
Aside from risk assessment concerns, another issue is the sustainability of the pretrial data system.
The county has 18 months before external technical assistance ends, and officials must secure how to keep the system running without outside financial support.
“At the end of the 18 months, there is going to be kind of a need at some point for us to figure out how this will ongoingly be updated,” Grant said.
Hennen said planning is already in motion.
“The primary support we’re getting, he’s writing all this code. The code hopefully will be in place,” she said. “It’s almost like following a recipe.”
According to the justice officials, national justice experts have cited Thurston County as an example for its ability to bring courts, prosecutors, public defenders and law enforcement together on pretrial policy.
“From the people that we’ve worked with at a national level, they did recognize that Thurston County was very unique in two major ways,” Schaller said.
The county was commended for aligning agencies that often operate at odds within the justice system.
“A lot of jurisdictions are collaborative, but the nature of the collaboration that we have, despite the criminal justice system, of course, being an adversarial system, they were very impressed by how everyone came to the table,” Schaller elaborated.
Thurston County set itself apart in actively involving law enforcement in pretrial policy discussions.
“We also did have the participation of law enforcement in a way that no other jurisdiction they had worked with had seen before,” Schaller said.
Though the county’s work has drawn national interest, officials acknowledge and admit that pretrial policy is still unsettled.
“This project will endure,” O’Connor said. “Hundreds of hours of in-kind work from all of us as stakeholders to this project.”
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