Program Profile: Milwaukee County (Wis.) Deferred Prosecution Program

This is a prosecutor-led pretrial diversion program to rehabilitate individuals convicted of misdemeanor or felony offenses who are at medium risk of reoffending. The program is rated Ineffective. There were statistically significant reductions in cases dismissed for treatment group individuals, compared with control group individuals. However, there were no statistically significant differences in the 2-year rearrest rate or days to first rearrest.

An Ineffective rating implies that implementing the program is unlikely to result in the intended outcome(s).

Program Goals/Target Population

The Milwaukee County Deferred Prosecution Program is a postfiling program in which the prosecutor files the case with the court but then suspends the adjudication process while program participation takes place. This program was established in Milwaukee County, Wis., in 2007. The program targets individuals with a wide range of misdemeanors and felonies who are classified as above low risk on the Level of Services Inventory Short Version (LSI-R:SV) and medium risk on the full-length Level of Services Inventory—Revised (LSI-R). The goal is to direct prosecutorial resources to the most-serious cases and rehabilitate individuals who are at medium risk for reoffending.

Program Components

Every defendant who is arrested and booked into the Milwaukee County Central Criminal Justice Facility is administered the short-form LSI-R:SV assessment (Lowenkamp et al. 2009), a brief risk-need screener that classifies defendants as low, medium, or high risk of reoffending. Among defendants who are legally eligible for diversion, those defendants whose risk level is medium or high on the LSI-R:SV are then administered the full-length LSI-R assessment, which is a comprehensive, validated risk-needs assessment tool that covers all of the major factors that have repeatedly been shown to predict reoffending, including criminal history, antisocial attitudes, antisocial peer associations, and substance abuse (Bonta and Andrews 2007; Andrews and Bonta 2010). Legally eligible defendants who are classified as medium risk on the full-length LSI-R are routed to the Deferred Prosecution Program on a voluntary basis. Defendants who score high risk on the LSI-R, and individuals with select charges (e.g., violent, firearms, or sex offenses) are ineligible for the program.

Participants can receive a range of individualized treatment and social services (such as community service, drug treatment or testing, counseling, restitution or other needs-based services) for a 6-month period. Successful completion of the program’s individualized treatment and social services leads to case dismissal, while program failure resumes traditional case prosecution.

Key Personnel

Administration of the LSI-R and diversion determinations are made by Universal Screening staff, a part of the administrative offices of the court system in Milwaukee County. The Deferred Prosecution Program is overseen by the deputy district attorney and staffed by four full-time assistant district attorneys and other community prosecutors.

Program Note

As mentioned above, every defendant who is arrested and booked into the Milwaukee County Central Criminal Justice Facility is administered the Level of Services Inventory Short Version (LSI-R:SV) risk-need assessment screen that classifies defendants as low, medium, or high risk of reoffending. Those in the low-risk category are not administered the full LSI-R and instead are routed to the Milwaukee Diversion Program. While the Deferred Prosecution and Diversion Programs use the same risk assessment screen and are both overseen by the deputy district attorney, the Diversion Program is prefiling (before charges are filed with the court) rather than postfiling, is intended for low-risk individuals, and provides a less-intensive service dosage (Davis et al. 2021). The Milwaukee Diversion Program was also reviewed for CrimeSolutions and received a rating of Effective.

Study

Davis and colleagues (2021) used a quasi-experimental design with propensity score matching to assess the effect of the Milwaukee Deferred Prosecution Program on convictions, rearrest, and time to first rearrest at the 2-year follow-up. All defendants in the sample were arrested in 2013. Defendants were screened for program eligibility based on their Level of Services Inventory—Revised (LSI-R) scores, as described above in the Program Description. Since all defendants (including those held at suburban facilities and those who were arrested on weekends, neither of whom were considered for inclusion in the program) were administered the LSI-R, it was possible to easily identify a pool of comparison cases with similar scores to those defendants who were diverted into the program.

Demographic, criminal history, instant case outcome (identified as either the arrest that triggered entry into the diversion program or, for comparison defendants, the first arrest within the specified timeframe), and 2-year rearrest data were obtained for both diversion and potential comparison defendants from the Milwaukee District Attorney’s Office. The Milwaukee Administrative Office of the Courts provided Level of Services Inventory Short Version (LSI-R:SV) risk assessment data—including both raw scores and risk classifications—for both diversion and comparison defendants. These scores were used to select potential comparisons for the program before the propensity score calculation.

Propensity score matching was then used to statistically equalize treatment and comparison groups on an array of demographic, criminal history, and instant case variables. For all instant cases and priors, the charge type and severity was identified first, then the group differences in the means or frequencies on the entire array of demographic, prior arrest, current charge, and other instant case variables were calculated. Next, a backward stepwise logistic regression was performed. The predicted probability of treatment group membership in the final step of this regression (the propensity score) was used to match each treatment case to its closest comparison case, using a straightforward one-to-one matching algorithm.

After matching, the deferred prosecution treatment group (n = 290) was an average of 27.9 years old, and the comparison group (n = 290) were 29.6 years old. The sample was predominately male (68 percent of the treatment group, 67 percent of the comparison group), White (56 percent of the treatment group, 59 percent of the comparison group) and Black (39 percent of the treatment group, 37 percent of the comparison group). The treatment group had an average of 1.77 prior arrests, compared with 1.73 prior arrests for the comparison group. The most common instant case charge categories were drug possession (31 percent of the treatment group, 30 person of the comparison group) and theft (23 percent of the treatment group, 27 percent of the comparison group). There were no statistically significant differences between the matched treatment and comparison groups on any measured characteristics.

To facilitate cross-site comparisons, odds ratios were computed for each outcome as an estimate of effect size. Survival analyses (Cox regression) were conducted to supplement the findings on the dichotomous rearrest outcomes. No subgroup analysis was conducted.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

Following are CrimeSolutions-rated programs that are related to this practice:

Rehabilitation Programs for Adults Convicted of a Crime

This practice includes programs that are designed to reduce recidivism among adults by improving their behaviors, skills, mental health, social functioning, and access to education and employment. They may become participants in rehabilitation programs during multiple points in their involvement with the criminal justice system. This practice is rated Promising for reducing recidivism among adults who have been convicted of an offense.

Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

Crime & Delinquency - Multiple crime/offense types

Why might a practice's outcome ratings differ from the ratings of specific programs encompassed by that practice?