Growth in Thurston County’s LEAD program signals big change in criminal justice culture

Here’s a bit of good news: Thurston County is making progress on finding ways to reduce crime while putting fewer people in jail. This progress comes from a new expansion of the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, known as LEAD, which offers help and human services rather than jail to low-level offenders.

LEAD originated in 2011 in Seattle following a court fight between The Defender Association and the Seattle Police Department over selective enforcement in drug cases that sent a disproportionate number of Black defendants to jail or prison.

In the wake of that court battle, Lisa Daugaard, deputy director of The Defender Association, sat down with a prosecutor and a police captain, who posed a question: “What if we all agreed to do something different in regards to drug enforcement; what would be better?”

Diverting people from the criminal justice system and into the health and human services system was a new and risky idea. The program was initially funded entirely with private donations, and available only to a small sample of offenders. But by 2016, it had proved its effectiveness, with a nearly 60 percent reduction in re-arrest rates for those lucky enough to be included.

Considering just how strained and inadequate the health and human services system was during those years, that’s a remarkable achievement. Since then, funding for mental health and addiction treatment has been steadily expanded. It’s still short of the need, but the gap between need and availability has shrunk.

Support for LEAD grew after 2020. That’s when the state Supreme Court threw out the state’s law against drug possession, triggering a legislative response that decriminalized it. That led to increased state funding for LEAD and the services that support it.

The funding was key to the expansion of Thurston County’s one-year-old LEAD program. The county was able to double the number of substance use disorder (SUD) professionals from four to eight, and the number of certified peer specialists from three to six.

Peer specialists are specially trained people who have lived experience with addiction and recovery, mental illness, and/or homelessness. The SUD professionals are qualified to perform initial evaluations and to connect people to various kinds of harm reduction and treatment.

This means the county — and participating jurisdictions Lacey, Olympia, Tumwater and Yelm — can now serve up to 120 people at once and keep caseloads at 20 per peer specialist.

The peer specialists are the heart of the program, because they create ongoing relationships of trust and mutual respect with participants. They help solve problems such as needing ID, health care, transportation to appointments, food, financial aid and cell phones to keep in touch. Peers will be paid $22.12 per hour, plus health insurance and access to (but not automatic inclusion in) the state retirement system.

The pay and benefits — along with the caseload limit — provide hope that job turnover will be low. This is vital because establishing trust with people whose mental health may be fragile takes time. When a peer leaves, those relationships are disrupted, sometimes cutting a vital lifeline.

There are still two significant gaps: access to housing and access to addiction treatment on demand. There has been progress on treatment; the wait has shrunk from months to weeks, but golden opportunities are still often missed. And even with new state and federal funding, it will take years to build, buy or renovate our way out of today’s housing shortage.

Still, it’s important to take time to celebrate hope and progress: We are, step by slow step, changing the culture of our criminal justice system. Police, prosecutors and courts have bought into the LEAD program, and to the idea that helping people change their lives is more productive than locking them up and then returning them to the same conditions they came from.

Expanding LEAD is not a panacea, but it’s an improvement that represents a decisive change in direction we’ve needed for a very long time.