EVERETT — Jane has had a good year.

Last winter, she was living on the streets in Everett after the house she was staying in burnt down. She wasn’t sure what her future held.

“I didn’t know how I was going to climb out of it,” said Jane, a pseudonym that she asked be used for privacy reasons.

In February 2021, she was set to be arrested for alleged trespassing, but a police officer mentioned a diversion program allowing her to avoid jail. She jumped at the chance.

Jane started working with a case manager, and in November she started renting a room in an Everett house. She said she is doing “much, much, much better.”

Between its launch in November 2020 and June 2021, the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program in Snohomish County got over 200 people referred to case managers, according to the county. Of those, 51 were connected with medical care, 29 with health insurance, 23 with mental health services and 22 with substance abuse treatment. Fifty got vouchers for temporary housing and 14 got long-term housing.

The program, also known as LEAD, has been heralded by local officials as vital to the county’s approach to crime and poverty.

Now, it could be expanding.

A $1.6 million grant from the Washington State Health Care Authority got the ball rolling last year. And late last month, Snohomish County LEAD received a $1.2 million grant from the federal Department of Justice. Combine that with a renewal of the existing grant, as well as $500,000 in additional state money, and the program has just about doubled its funding.

The Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office works with police in Lynnwood and Everett to refer people to a case manager who can connect them with help. It primarily serves individuals who are unsheltered, have mental health issues, struggle with a drug addiction, or a combination of those three.

“What LEAD does is it aims to provide alternatives to arrests and prosecution by providing behavioral and medical services, among other things, to some of the most acutely marginalized people in our community,” Snohomish County Prosecutor Adam Cornell said.

Project manager Ashley Dawson said there are two ways to get referred: pre-booking diversions and social contact referrals. The former is when a person could otherwise be arrested for a misdemeanor or a low-level felony, but is offered diversion to a case manager as an alternative to jail. And the latter is when officers identify a person who could qualify for LEAD, but doesn’t have a specific offense leading to arrest.

The second route is how most participants get involved.

Officers then contact the LEAD hotline staffed from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., and a case manager tries to get to them within 30 minutes, Dawson said. If the referral comes outside those hours, LEAD tries to get to folks within three days.

Once in the program, participants work with their case manager to build a plan for success. There’s no golden ticket to housing, but LEAD can be their liaison through the complicated process.

That’s how Jason Marshall recently got approved for an Everett apartment. He’d been living unsheltered in the Everett area off and on for the last six years before participating in LEAD.

“It’s nice trying to focus on the right things rather than trying to survive every day,” Marshall said.

LEAD has helped Jane get a new ID and glasses. She also is looking to get counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder. She called the program “life-changing.”

“Pretty much anything I need help with, they help me with,” Jane said.

While other local police agencies may have embedded social workers, it’s these long-term “intensive case management services” that make LEAD unique, advocates argue.

“We just realize that everyone has a story, and we just don’t have any systems who are really equipped to hear it and do something about what comes out of that story,” Dawson said.

LEAD was first developed in Seattle a decade ago. Program participants there were 58% less likely to be arrested after enrolling compared to those who weren’t involved with LEAD, a 2017 study found.

In Snohomish County, the program has four case managers and an intake coordinator from Evergreen Recovery Centers, Dawson said. Each works with 20 to 25 people at a time. So LEAD’s current capacity is about 100 to 125 participants at a time. People can stay enrolled in the program as long as they need.

The county wrote in its application for the $1.2 million that the money would be used to hire additional case managers to serve 75 more participants at any given time. And of those, the county figures a quarter will be placed in housing, a quarter will get substance use treatment, a quarter will get behavioral health services and all could get overdose prevention supplies and education.

The program has several benefits, Cornell said. For one, it’s more expensive to put people in jail than it is to connect them with social services. It also helps “break the repeated cycle of arrest, prosecution, incarceration, arrest, prosecution, incarceration,” he said. And, Cornell added, it’s simply more compassionate.

In a statement, county Executive Dave Somers called LEAD “a critical component of our efforts to divert people from the criminal justice system for crimes that stem from issues related to behavioral health or poverty.”

Other efforts include the county’s 44-bed diversion center that aims to steer unsheltered people with behavioral health issues or substance use disorder toward treatment. Within the prosecuting attorney’s office, there’s also drug and mental health courts allowing people charged with non-violent offenses to get treatment instead of jail time.

With the money, Cornell hopes LEAD can expand to new parts of the county beyond Everett and Lynnwood, arguing that could “widen the circle of justice.” He said there are probably thousands who could benefit.

In a January 2019 count of Snohomish County’s unsheltered population, over 1,100 people were identified as homeless, likely an undercount. More than half lived outside. The rest were staying in shelters or transitional housing. This group was disproportionately made up of people of color, the county noted in the grant application. Over 40% of those unsheltered were in Everett, much higher than its share of the county population. Lynnwood had about 7%, also higher than its share.

Both Lynnwood and Everett are more racially diverse than the county, according to census data.

After he leaves office, Cornell hopes LEAD won’t be seen as particularly innovative, but the norm.

“People will have moved on from the old way of thinking about law and justice,” he said. “They will have moved on from thinking that the answer to every problem is to throw somebody in jail.”

Choking up, Jane said her time outside last winter was “tough, really tough.” She didn’t see an end in sight.

Now, the former cook at an Everett cafe wants to start working again.

Jake Goldstein-Street: 425-339-3439; jake.goldstein-street@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @GoldsteinStreet.