Program Profile: Milwaukee (Wis.) County Diversion Program

This is a prosecutor-led pretrial diversion program to rehabilitate individuals with misdemeanor or felony offenses who are at low risk of reoffending. The program is rated Effective. There were statistically significant reductions in the rearrest rate, days to rearrest, and cases dismissed for treatment group individuals, compared with comparison group individuals, at the 2-year follow-up.

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

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

Program Goals/Target Population

The Milwaukee County Diversion Program is a prefiling program in which the prosecutor receives the case from law enforcement but opts not to file charges with the court, provided the defendant completes diversionary programming. 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 low risk on the Level of Services Inventory Short Version (LSI-R:SV). The goal is to rehabilitate individuals who are at low 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, Lovins, and Latessa 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 in the low-risk category are routed to the Diversion Program on a voluntary basis, provided they do not have an ineligible offense (e.g., a violent, firearms, sex, or drug sales offense).

Participants receive a relatively low service dosage, responsive to their low risk, consisting mainly of community service, educational programs, required restitution, and, if needed, drug treatment and attendance at a restorative justice conference. The individualized treatment is for 6 months. If a participant successfully completes the program’s individualized treatment and social services and remains crime free for the program period, the participant’s case will never be filed with the court. Program failure results in the participant’s case being filed in court.

Key Personnel

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

Study

Davis and colleagues (2021) used a quasi-experimental design with propensity score matching to assess the effect of the Milwaukee Diversion 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 Short Version (LSI-R:SV) 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:SV, it was possible to 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 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 diversion 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 were 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 diversion treatment group (n = 139) was an average of 29.6 years old, and the comparison group (n = 139) averaged 27.0 years old. The sample was predominately male (71 percent of both the treatment and comparison groups), Black (53 percent of the treatment group, 53 percent of the comparison group), and White (40 percent of the treatment group, 40 percent of the comparison group). The treatment group had an average of 0.50 prior arrests, compared with 0.60 prior arrests for the comparison group. The most common instant case charge categories were drug possession (26 percent of both the treatment and comparison groups), theft (21 percent of the treatment group, 25 percent of the comparison group), and other charge (29 percent of the treatment group, and 22 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:

Labriola, Melissa, Warren A. Reich, Robert C. Davis, Priscillia Hunt, Michael Rempel, and Samantha Cherney. 2018. Prosecutor-Led Pretrial Diversion: Case Studies in Eleven Jurisdictions. Document No. 251664. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice.

Lowenkamp, Christopher T., Brian Lovins, and Edward J. Latessa. 2009. “Validating the Level of Service Inventory | Revised and the Level of Service Inventory: Screening Version With a Sample of Probationers.” Prison Journal 89(2):192–204.

Rempel, Michael, Melissa Labriola, Priscillia Hunt, Robert C. Davis, Warren A. Reich, and Samantha Cherney. 2018. NIJ’s Multisite Evaluation of Prosecutor-Led Diversion Programs: Strategies, Impacts, and Cost-Effectiveness. Document No. 251665. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice.

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?