I'm Rhonda Van Skoonhovven from court services. I'm here with Kate Hanley, our office manager. Kate did all the work on this. Full disclosure. I'm the one who she was about to strangle because I kept asking more questions. So Kate put did a ton of hard work for this report. So we thank you for giving us this opportunity
to share our year-end data. Um 24 2024 was just a year of growth for us and we had a shift in our case complexity. Um, and we've implemented data collection, some risk assessment, resource use, and evidence-based responsibility. So, we've had a lot of changes in the year and a
half that I have been here as the director. So, we're going to start with our adult statistics. In 24, we experienced a 68% increase in the number of our probation cases open. So, here we we're showing you our different cases, and I'm going to go through these. These
are cases, not bodies. So, know that one body can have more cases. is somebody can come in with three or four charges. So, our administrative cases are low risk and need only basic tracking. So, we use an administrative assistant to do that. At this point, we've also pulled
in some of a probation officer's time to take care of some of that just because those numbers are so high. Those cases include misdemeanor DWIs with no prior history, misdemeanor traffic cases with conditions completed before sentencing, and some driving after revocation and
driving after suspension with few or no conditions. So, some state of adjudication cases and some traditional cases may be in that administrative monitoring case load, but we don't double dip. We don't double count them, but we do have some of those in that admin case load. Those the state
adjudication is just a legal language. it that allows the defendant to keep a conviction on on the off their case if they comply with probation. So, traditional cases have already received their conviction. Both of those categories are monitored and supervised
by probation agents. They include all misdemeanor and gross misdemeanor person offenses, DWIs, drug offenses, and other criminal offenses. With those cases, the agent does a risk assessment on all those cases coming in and monitors conditions such as referrals for assessments, making sure clients follow
through with the recommendations from those assessments such as treatment, no use, random testing, domestic programming, cognitive skills programming, and counseling, just to name a few of the conditions they are monitoring. So, the number of bodies we processed
had a 25% increase. So, this just shows our volume. We're starting out higher. We're ending out higher. We've had this growth now over a couple of years. So, we're just we're processing more cases and people through our system. The next graph shows we did three
snapshots throughout the year of our agent case loads just so we can see um where agents are sitting. You can see Emily is the agent who does an administrative case load and she also does a pre-trial case load. We also have Lindsay is our front office who is doing the admin case load. She is
also the one responsible for all data entry on all adult cases. So she's just being overwhelmed at this point when we were talking about having a half-time case administrator. That would be that job. So then Lindsay could concentrate on data entry, meeting those people at
the counter, answering phones instead of being distracted constantly by tracking down people. We are also in the process of changing Andrea Emmery to a lead agent in evidence-based practices. So, we're shifting her case load to a
high-risisk female case load up to 25. Besides her case load, Andrea is also facilitating groups and she will be training staff in EBP practices and making sure we have fidelity within those practices. So, throughout the year, she will just be doing kind of tests on us to make sure that we have
fidelity and accuracy in what we are doing. So, some of the future EBP that we will need to be doing is we are doubling down on our risk assessments. All agents are trained in the LSCMI. They are also having a community of practice this month. They need to do certain things throughout the year to
keep that assessment um practice up to speed. We are also going to be implementing uh carry guides, which is skill building with their clients within their individual times that they meet with them. One juvenile agent is already implementing this and Andrea is implementing this. Eventually, we're
going to have all agents trained to do that. Um, we are also doing more case planning with clients so that those high-risisk clients will come in instead of just monitoring that court order. They will have a case plan that addresses more than just what's on that uh court order. We can look at housing,
education, things that might be lacking in their lives and help them find pathways to figure out ways to to better their lives. So, this is just a graph that shows what American probation and parole says is what we need to have for case load
numbers. We carry a mixed case load in Good Hugh County. These of course are are um out into intensive, moderate, low and high. So this is just a guideline, but we know that when we reduce cases, agents have more time with those higher risk people. We know that we should put
our services to those higher risk people. Those low people hopefully are one-time stop people. Those admin cases, we hopefully don't see them again. We know the time and money should be spent on those medium to high-risisk people. And so those lower case loads just let us spend more time do better
interventions with them so that they don't come back in the system. So just a question if I could when you say lowrisk or administrative you you think they're once and done.
Some are not all but some are. You have a any idea what percentage are end up coming back? No. I could find that for you though. Off the top of my head, I don't. Um, you know, we know that
a lot of those people don't come back in. So, and we also know that the more time we spend with those low people, we actually create damage and that they will come more likely to come into the system versus if we just left them alone, let them get their conditions done and move on. So, we do know that.
We know if we spend time with them, we increase their probability of coming back into the system. because they like to visit or Well, I I mean, because there's got to be kind of like that um
sweet spot of how much time you need to spend and when you're spending too much time. And it's it's got to be a balance of that. And I Right. I I got a feeling that some people just need more time and some people don't.
Exactly. And you know, as we're becoming better at our risk assessments or we we're we're supervising by our risk assessments, what we were finding out is agents were spending a lot of time with low because guess what? It's easier. It's more rewarding.
Um people like to talk to you in that low that lower risk ones. The high-risisk ones, we're chasing people. We're chasing people. We're having hard conversations. So, we're also trying to get our agents to be able to shift and put their resources where they're needed the most.
Uh, we just in the last two years, we've tightened up that risk assessment. Um, so that has been super helpful in kind of figuring out how we can more effectively manage all these bodies. Also, I mean, we have the same number of agents and a lot more bodies that we're trying to manage and trying to do that
the most effective way. So the next couple shows you how our agents how they have their their risk levels are split out. So right they might have 130 on their case load but they're not all high. They're not all medium. The second graph has Emily.
Emily has that pre-trial and she's also carrying that admin case load. So she does not she has a lot more unclassified. We're not spending time doing risk assessments on those admin and pre-trial ones. We will do a risk assessment when those pre-trials come in
on supervision if they do. So our supervision, we had 40 40% that were supervised, 60% that were unsupervised. So this was very similar to last year, just a few percent difference. So it just shows you we are we are really having a high number of
cases unsupervised. That those low low ones are the primary focus right now because we have so many bodies we're trying to keep track of. This next one is offense severity. It's just I think interesting to see what's happening in the county. Um kind of the highlights out of this graph are that
traffic and accident was our largest and it more than tripled. It went 231% went from 136 to 450. Still broadly distributed by gender 64% male 36% female. Second largest category was DWI.
This was a 45% increase 184 to 266. Um number of males remained constant from last year. The number of females increased from 53 to 136. Property damage cases more than doubled 9 to19. Domestic assault cases increased
52% 31 to 47. Primarily male offense group at 81%. Theft cases grew 82% 39 to 71. That was a near even gender split that leans slightly more female. It's just one of those few um offense categories that has
more females. We're still primarily a male-dominated um offender list. So, disturbing the peace rose at 62% was male dominant at 71%. In contrast, we had drug offenses and some other smaller categories that decreased slightly. So, we show an
increase in overall volume, but also kind of dynamics, a lot of those lower level offenses growing and um some increased female representation. So this is, you know, we're shifting and changing in programming um our office and what we do.
So this is our felony reduced down. So in 2021, there was a policy change in Good Hugh County. It used to always be if it was charged a felony, it stayed a felony. In 2021, that changed. So those felonies that were reduced down came to our office. So this year, um
that raised quite a bit. person charges increased 50%, burglary and theft decreased 12%. So, it's just kind of interesting to see kind of the range of charges that are being resolved to reduce charges. This also shows the presence investigations that our agents are doing. So, these are
mandated by statute. They're also very time inensive for agents to do. You're talking anywhere from 8 to 20 hours to get one of these reports done. Okay. Full disclosure, we are not a money-making department. We will never be a money-making
department. So, these shows our fees that were assessed comparing 23 and 24. So, the it has been sunsetting of fees has been delayed to 2029. At this point, there is a big push to still continue fees especially as community supervision continues to be underfunded. Um, you
know, we are at 91.7% funding this year. So, we're already 15 million short. So there is a big push that they are not going to let us stop our fees hopefully. So these are all the interventions that we use with our adult unit. A range of
things that we do. We have education classes, skill building, accountability focused interventions. Um so anger management, domestic violence programming just gives you an idea of what we're sentencing people doing, what we're trying to have adult clients do.
We have EHM and EAM on this uh graph here. And we're going to move to the next one. This is the same one. We're comparing 23 and 24, which is interesting because we have more cases and more bodies. However, we have less jail time that was ordered and less EHM
that was ordered. It's just a little interesting thing that's happening that comes from the bench down. We don't have any control over that, but it's just interesting to see that we have higher numbers and lower um lower of these conditions ordered. You you know these acronyms
very well, but I don't. Oh, what did I say? Ehm. EHM is electronic home monitoring. E AM is electronic alcohol monitoring. And so you can be locked down and still have to test for alcohol or you can be
walking around and have to test for alcohol. Two different things. And sometimes they're used separately, sometimes they're used together. Oh, our sentence to service which we had talked about prior also. So back in 2014 we had somebody retire who did the
halftime STS coordinating job. So and I think that is when those the field us in the field stopped getting our people to STS as well as they should have. She was dedicated. She was calling those people. She was the one helping with the schedule. She was in contact with those
crew leaders daily. So, we lost that position and have has not recovered and I think and co CO did not help STS numbers either, but I think that's part of the issue of us not getting those street people on that STS crew. Um, the juvenile crew is also a very difficult
crew. We have youth with very challenging behaviors that cannot be placed in a community service work site. So, um, that is also a challenging crew to have and we have very specific rules for that. If only one female shows up, she goes home. we we can't have one
female on an allmale crew. So, we just have some logistical issues that we've always had with that juvenile crew that we're hoping if we take that on, we can we can figure some other things out. Linda Rhonda, can you have a crew with both males and females? Or if it's just one
female, you can't have one. We mix males and females, but if there's just one female show, Yep. If the two females showed up, the crew would go. Thank you. And the crew still goes, that female just gets sent home. So on to our juvenile statistics. So the key highlight here was juvenile
cases increased 50%. So we had we went from 110 to 165 cases. Once again administrative cases more than doubled. Um traditional cases increased by 25%. Our pre-trial stayed very steady.
Um our bodies increased by 20%. So, this just shows you 23 compared to 24. Um, as in the adult unit, we're just processing more cases and more bodies through our system. So, we have two juvenile agents. This is a snapshot of their case loads. Um,
we're trying to keep Kristen's case load smaller. Um, she is a representation for our county on many, many boards, um, such as Truency, the opioid um, OSAC opioid settlement advisory council. She's on the MCA juvenile justice safe
harbor. Um she facilitates the sex in the law classes. So they go out, she goes out to the schools in the county and they do a little presentation on sex in the law because youth do not understand what they could potentially be charged with by having sex with
underage minors, you know, the age difference. So she goes out to educate the classes on that. She does that with the health teachers. Um she's on the youth prevention team, uh county chemical health and others. So we try to keep her numbers a little bit lower.
This shows kind of their risk levels, what they they ended up at in 24. Uh their average case load when you include their petties was around 46. Their low increased 14%, medium risk increased 47% and those high risk um came down some.
Once again, those medium and high-risisk cases are the cases that take a lot of time and especially with uh limited resources has uh though the agents become more counselors. They're more on call for those crisis situations. So, um they work very hard.
The next screen shows the interventions that juvenile agents are using in their dispositions. So, as you see, there's a wider variety than the adult unit. And we have our staff is so great. They are just committed to being creative with kids so that they can balance community
safety with the needs and risk of those kids and their families. The STS numbers that you've seen before at the 8:00 one, um, as said before, we've had no juvenile crew since April. So, we have a lot of kids kind of out there that are not getting their work done. So, agents are just trying to be
creative. They're doing classes. Um, some of them are doing work for their parents, just trying to figure out some way for them to get some hours in so that they can be discharged at their time and not be violated because we don't have a crew. So, in 2024, um, these are the amount of
screens that the juvenile agents completed. They use the Maisy tool. So, this these are mandated by statute also and it generates money. So, last year we generated just under 33,000. That money goes to HHS, Health and Human Services for um to help with mental health case
management. Drop in the bucket. 33,000. It's at least a little something that helps them out. But we know HHS does a great job in helping us provide children's mental health services. So except for payables, we try not to find our youth. These fees come from
some of those youth who convert their community service worker STS into fines if they have a full-time job or if they're moving out of the county. We just that's a case-byase basis. So these are the amounts we recovered in 23 and 24. And what we do is we turn around and
we use that money for um juveniles who cannot afford to pay for some of their classes or some of their programming. We use that money to help pay for that that programming. Our out of home placement budget. So in 24 we spent over 131,000.
Um we had 21 unduplicated youth who we placed 14 male and seven female. EHM was our most utilized followed by West Central and Dakota County Juvenile Services Center. Now some of these youth out of those 21 were in multiple placements. Uh we received one youth
this year who when we got them were in 28 placements before we got them. Um they had traveled around and became a good Hugh County resident. So we have some high needs kids in that area.
And a little update on that Houston County bed that we contracted. So this is just the time from January to the end of May. We utilized that bed 59 nights out of those five months. So, um, we're actually paying $644 a night when we use
that. We have had some we're we're so grateful for the bed. I mean, we've had some Friday afternoon school shooting incences that that child has had to be placed there. We've also had some cases where we've had a cohort of kids um that we've had to split. So, if they went to
Benplit, we would have probably had another child at Houston County. Um, but they did find a bed in Dakota County at that point. The other big news in the juvenile world is we have a youth rehabilitation program. We call it YRP. This is a
community uh intervention and prevention grant from office of justice programs. So we just finished our we will finish a year and a half of this. This has been a work in progress starting a program from scratch. But this is youth get a lot of services. So this is for our high-risisk
youth and those higher medium that are going into that. But they during the week they get four to six hours of individual and or family therapy and up to 10 hours of skills work and they're in this program three to seven months. So they can get from 180 to 500 hours of
services depending on how long they are in that program. And we looked at a return of investment on this kind of going with placements 30 45 and 90day placements. If we can keep those youth out of those placements we are saving 5
to 15,000 per youth. Now granted, we've had some of those youth in that program have to take a little short stop somewhere to get under control and then we bring them back into that program. So we we're hoping to grow this program more. We will be applying for the grant again. We had a site visit, had great
feedback on it. Um we have some growing pains, but I think that's with any new program that will happen. So this is just demographics for your information. Um the first one we did geographic information just because I thought it would be interesting for commissioners to see what criminal activity was happening in your in your
area. So with this you can also see that we have 451 outofcount residents that we service. So 28 we could transfer 28 of those 451 out. Transfer is very difficult because of eligibility. There's just written into statute what
we can transfer and what we can't. The other thing is we cannot transfer somebody who is homeless. So we have a lot of metro clients that are homeless. Even though they've been living in a shelter for the last 10 years, that county will still not take that resident. They most of them are familiar
with them, but they will not take them into their supervision. We only had 19 transferred out that were accepted or we 19 that came in that we that we accepted. So 28 out, 19 in. The last one
is just gender, race, and ethnicity. So, we can see who's coming through our doors. We do have some difficulty with this data collection. We just have a lot of especially adult clients who choose not to fill out the information. We haven't figured a way around that yet.
But any questions? I know I have a question. Um when we did the bed in Houston County, we wanted to know is one going to be enough or do we need two? And one one is enough. Okay. And how is that facility? Have
they been enough enough there that it's working for Houston County or is it a challenge? I think it has been a challenge. Um Moore County has a contract too. They have used the less than us but they they have a contract. So I don't their beds
have not been filled yet. And I think for us the challenge also is the distance you know it's available for the police and the sheriff to use also but Friday night when something's happening the difficulty of taking somebody off the road for 5 hours to transport intake
and come back has been a challenge for us. Um and they've they've been great to work with. Houston County has been absolutely fabulous to work with. They I mean they've had some growing pains too. I mean, we found out that youth were calling friends from there, and we just
happened to find out cuz somebody, one of the friends has said, "Oh, I talked to so and so, and you shouldn't be able to talk to so and so." And so, we just did some digging in. They were just running it like an adult unit. You can call out in an adult unit. You know, we said, "We only want them to be calling parents, probation officers, social
workers. That's it." So, we've had some growing pains with that, but they have been wonderful as far as court hearings. They will take that child out to their courthouse. We'll have a Zoom hearing and then bring that child back to the facility because they have to leave the facility because it's an 8-day hold. They have to physically leave that
facility. But we also that would be a minimum 10-hour day for our sheriffs to transport back and forth. So, they've been really excellent in helping us figure out some of those logistical things. Good. Mhm. Well, and I've talked to commissioners from down there and I've
heard that it the you know, usage isn't quite enough and all those things are a challenge. So, I just and it's the other thing is that hold nothing, you know, nothing happens there. There's no programming. So, I think that's a difficulty, too. I mean, we're trying to move our kids as quick
as we can out of there. You know, we hold them only as long as we absolutely have to because we want to get them out of there and into programming. Go ahead. Thank you very much for the very detailed report. I really appreciate
that you put in the pros and the cons and what the growing pains are so that we really get a full picture of what you're going through. So, thank you very much. Yeah. And we had two years of data which I think made it a little more interesting to really just see what was shifting and changing. You know, the
thing is those low cases are taking up a lot of our time and we have somebody at the front who's trying to data entry 1,800 bodies and also take phone calls from clients and and so that is our difficulty and I I I have a hard time having Emily an agent doing an admin
case load. I mean, it's really just administrative. Her skills are not being used in that administrative case load. But so that is where that other halfime would come in to be with that SDS coordinator. Then we could have somebody just taking it would be simple. It's pretty clean cut then in our office also
of where the cases are. So I could I and I was wondering that was you were going through the numbers and the increase and then not having any more bodies to work on them. Yeah. And in 2021 also court administration
stopped taking care of traffic offenses and for some reason our office got them and so that has been that also that increase at admin bodies is we have taken those over. Um so we do all they have is a fine usually and be good but somebody has to monitor that monitor that the fine is paid monitor that they
don't have any other traffic um incidences during their time of supervision. So, so we also have those cases which is increasing that admin case load and all our work is dependent on county attorney what they charge out and they've been busy too as you can see
and okay excellent. Any other questions? Good work. Thank you. Thank you. This and in a few minutes we'll be in a health and human services meeting.
Okay, let's make it earlier next. Yeah, that's right.