A rural, two-county Missouri circuit had no money to supervise the people bond reform told it to release. It built the pretrial program around RePath instead. The prosecutor is the one who reported the jail count.
Book a DemoWhen Missouri changed its bond rules, the circuit had to release people it had no budget to supervise. A rural, two-county circuit does not have a fleet of ankle monitors or a pretrial office with a dozen staff. It had one pretrial administrator, a prosecutor, a judge, and a 55-bed jail that was over capacity all the time.
The circuit made RePath the non-monetary bond condition. People are enrolled in court, on the phone they already have, before they leave the building. The pretrial administrator signs up a whole line of people in about five minutes. No device is fitted, no vendor is called, and no funding step sits between the judge's decision and the person going home.
The prosecutor's answer to the phone objection has become the line every rural program borrows: they may not have a house, they may not have a car, but they have a phone. People do not leave their phones. If they do, the program knows.
The jail was at 64 before RePath, in a facility built for 55. After the program was built around RePath, it was at 33. That is a headcount the prosecutor reported, not a model. The circuit now has 95% of its pretrial population on RePath; the remaining 5% are in residential treatment without phone access, which is the exception that makes the number believable.
Four reminders go out before every court date. Two years in, the pretrial administrator said failures to appear were so far down that the judges were surprised. The court also uses the compliance score as its incentive and sanction currency: staff call people who drop below the standard, and the prosecutor uses the score to reward people who keep it up.
The prosecutor uses RePath to assure victims that people are checking in, and sets exclusion and inclusion zones on domestic cases. The zones warn the person before they cross the line. If they keep going, they are choosing to go back to jail. The circuit also runs house arrest as a sanction on the phone, which it had no way to do before.
Every treatment court participant in the circuit is on RePath at one of three supervision levels, with check-in times built around work schedules. The high level checks in eight times a day. The treatment court administrator found that participants answer the app honestly when they would not answer a person: they will lie to your face and then tell the truth in the app.
Nothing the county owns can walk off. There is no hardware to lose, return, or replace. The pretrial administrator's summary is the whole budget case for a small program: they do not have giant budgets for a bunch of ankle monitors like the big counties do, and RePath does everything she wants it to.
"We were at 64 before RePath, over capacity all the time. Now we are at 33."
"After two years of using RePath, our failures to appear are so far down, the judges are so surprised."
"This does work in rural areas. If you question if it works where you are, it works in our rural area for almost everyone."
"Judges were skeptical, but now they think it's miraculous."
Bring your caseload and officer counts. We will show you the math on your numbers, not ours.
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