People accused of a crime walk a thin line between freedom and rearrest while awaiting trial. Now, as more people in San Francisco are being released pretrial because of a recent state Supreme Court decision, the organization that for decades helped defendants navigate that precipice has for the most part stopped taking new clients.
No one is ready to take its place.
The San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project, a pioneering 50-year-old nonprofit that has helped thousands of pretrial defendants stay out of jail, started winding down this summer after the city and courts decided to cut the organization’s annual contract by the end of the fiscal year.
The city had planned for SF Pretrial to hand over services to a new division of the court’s Adult Probation Department, under a $12.7 million yearly contract, next year.
But faced with hemorrhaging staff, reduced private funding and an increasing workload, SF Pretrial’s leaders stopped taking new clients for its two main programs in early August, even though the Adult Probation Department wasn’t ready to take over.
“As staff leave and our end date approaches, we have gradually reduced the number of new people entering our programs while continuing to work with those already enrolled,” wrote Matt Miller, interim CEO of SF Pretrial. “If we cannot see someone through their time with us, it is better to be honest about that before we begin than to take someone on and leave them without the support they were promised.”
As of Sept. 30, the organization will no longer take any new referrals, and will close entirely on Nov. 13. The Adult Probation Department, meanwhile, says it won’t be ready to pick up pretrial services until January 2027.
Since 1976, defendants could be enrolled in SF Pretrial’s Assertive Case Management by a judge, if that judge decided that they were eligible for release while awaiting trial but needed support to ensure they’d keep coming to court. A case manager would pick the person up, assess them and develop a detailed plan for their continued rehabilitation.
The In-Custody Referral program, meanwhile, was recommended for people judges were more hesitant to release. The program connected case managers with people still in jail awaiting trial. SF Pretrial’s case managers would visit the clients in jail, evaluate them there, develop a plan based on their individual cases and present them to the judge as a condition for the person’s release.
In both programs, case managers were responsible for supervising their client — following up with them, keeping them on time for court hearings, informing judges if their clients weren’t complying with required plans, helping them enroll in electronic monitoring programs and supporting them with critical services to keep them out of trouble.
Those programs served 1,753 people in just the first quarter of 2026.
While SF Pretrial had all kinds of clients, many referred to it have historically been affected by mental illnesses, cognitive problems or substance abuse disorders, and were often without housing or healthcare. These people, said former presiding justice of the city’s court of appeal Anthony Kline, are “the most rehabilitatable cohort in the criminal justice system in this county.”
SF Pretrial not only helped manage pretrial individuals’ cases — it also made sure that every case manager was responsible for finding them places to stay, healthcare, and the mental health or addiction treatment needed to stabilize them.
Now, in the gap left by SF Pretrial’s closing, judges are releasing pretrial defendants without access to individual services, or else hoping defense attorneys will take on the extra work.
“We’re gonna see a lot of people on the street who are not being monitored, not being supported, whose addiction is being ignored, whose homelessness is not being taken into account,” said Kline, who has vocally opposed SF Pretrial’s closure.
Mission Local spoke with more than a dozen defense attorneys who expressed concern about the gap in services. Aleem Raja, co-manager of the public defender’s felony unit, said it’s “a mistake” to think that the Adult Probation Department will be able to fill SF Pretrial’s role in this interim period. “There is no transition right now,” he said.
‘When you go down there by yourself, it’s harder’
The first time Freddie Copeland heard about SF Pretrial, he remembered thinking, “Who the hell is that?”
Copeland, a 65-year-old who has lived most of his life in San Francisco, was arrested in February 2025. He was released from jail after almost a week and placed in SF Pretrial’s Assertive Case Management program.
Over the last year and a half, SF Pretrial got Copeland housed and connected with health services. The staff, he said, also helped him arrive to court hearings on time to keep him from being rearrested, and made sure he understood the “legalese” behind his case.
Copeland said he’s worked with a number of other organizations, but that SF Pretrial is the first place that helped him navigate the many pieces of a complicated system. “SF Pretrial has done way more than everybody else,” he said. “Everywhere else you’re just a number.” At SF Pretrial, Copeland said he actually trusted his caseworker.
The organization, said private defense attorney Jennie Stepanian, gained the trust of clients because it was an independent third-party system, not part of law enforcement or the courts. “The beautiful part about SF Pretrial,” she said,” is that they would come into our cases like a mythical creature and pick up all the pieces of what to do with each individual person.”
Stepanian said that she has sent a number of vulnerable defendants to SF Pretrial: people with cognitive disabilities, who are unhoused, or who suffer from PTSD. SF Pretrial has always prided itself on hiring formerly homeless or incarcerated people, according to its staff, and Stepanian said her clients got services from people they felt safe with to talk honestly about their challenges.
Who will cover the gap?
As the number of people being released from jail rises, there are fewer resources to keep them on track until the adult probation department is ready. As ACLU Norcal attorney Avram Frey said, “There’s no plan now.”
Superior judge Matthew Kahn explained to one defense attorney last month that currently, in the gap between SF Pretrial’s programs and whenever Adult Probation’s new program is ready, the court is “recommending folks to CASC.”
CASC, the Community Assessment and Services Cente, is an arm of San Francisco’s probation department. The center has historically been a place for individuals convicted of nonviolent crimes to get support enrolling in classes like anger management, finding housing or other services. Many attorneys told Mission Local that CASC provides good services — but, they said, it isn’t a full replacement for SF Pretrial.
While SF Pretrial was open 9 to 5 every weekday and would send caseworkers to pick up defendants from the jails upon release, CASC only has pretrial case workers available for a couple hours a day. And in that window, defendants must get to SoMa on their own and find CASC’s office, directly next to the Adult Probation Department.
While CASC can connect clients with behavioral classes, housing options and drug treatment plans, many pretrial defendants are simply ordered to go to the office and get a signed piece of paper confirming that they checked in. Unlike S.F. Pretrial, CASC does not have case managers who follow up with pretrial clients, supervising their criminal cases and delivering individualized reports to the court.
On Aug. 21, when visiting superior court judge Gloria Rhynes (who was in the process of ordering supervision conditions for a defendant in her court) learned that SF Pretrial was no longer taking referrals, she had only two words: “Oh boy.”
Two jobs in one
In the absence of SF Pretrial’s main programs, many defense attorneys are doing the work of case managers themselves — or trying to find and fund social workers in an already overburdened court system.
“I’m having to coordinate getting [my clients] social workers,” said private defense attorney Rose Mishaan.
“I don’t have a psychology degree,” Mishaan said. “And I feel like I’m being forced into the position of having to act like a case manager instead of a lawyer, which is really challenging.”
Anjuli Webb, a deputy public defender, said that she has seen many attorneys taking on the additional brunt of social work.
“It’s additional hours to our workload,” she said, and detracts from the time she can spend preparing for her clients’ trials.
Frey, the ACLU attorney, said that with the lapse in services, the city will likely see “increased detention, either for behavioral issues or failure to appear,” and more problems on the streets that might lead to re-arrests.
Several attorneys shared with Mission Local that since the closing of S.F. Pretrial programs, they have already seen more clients fail to appear — and wind up with warrants for their rearrest as a result.
“Even if you thought Pretrial stinks, you would have wanted to avoid this,” Frey said.
Attorneys expressed hope that the Adult Probation Department will be successful when it starts up in January, and pointed to the pretrial division’s new director, Melanie Kushnir-Pappalardo, who ran the city’s collaborative courts for years.
But no substantive alternative is ready for the people being released today.
