Cuyahoga County has multiple diversion programs that can allow people charged with felonies to avoid a criminal record. It's not clear how many people participate or how well the programs work. Credit: Rachel Dissell / The Marshall Project

By Alexandra Arriaga, The Marshall Project

Diversion is an umbrella term that refers to programs that offer alternatives to incarceration — like “exit ramps” on a highway. 

In Cuyahoga County and elsewhere, these interventions happen at different points within the criminal justice system: before a police encounter, before an arrest, before charges, or before a conviction and incarceration. 

The Cuyahoga County felony courts have offered some form of diversion for decades. In theory, they exist to give people another chance, sparing some defendants a felony conviction and the collateral damages of incarceration such as family separation or job loss. Keeping people from behind bars has practical benefits for the county too: As jail conditions worsen and the county pours more money into covering staff hiring and overtime, overcrowding grows. 

Signal Cleveland and The Marshall Project – Cleveland are partners in covering criminal justice issues in Cleveland. Sign up for the local newsletter.

The Marshall Project has an ongoing investigation into Cuyahoga County’s criminal courts called Testify. As a part of that project, a team of reporters has been tackling questions community members have about the court system. (Find some of the answers here. Or ask your own.)

One reader, who had a family member with a felony case, wanted to know whether a particular Common Pleas judge had “ever used the Diversion Program for any defendant in her courtroom?”

The question seemed straightforward at first. But when we started looking for the answer, we came back with more questions. First, what does “diversion” really mean in the Cuyahoga County court system? And what do we know about how it works?

Answering simple questions about diversion is difficult for a number of reasons. For starters, each of the four diversion programs offered within the court system is unique. Prosecutors get to pick who qualifies for some of the programs. Defendants get to decide if they want to participate. Some programs require defendants to plead guilty before starting a yearlong program. If successful, their case is sealed and expunged. Defendants in other programs are sentenced before entering diversion. These cases are reopened and dismissed if the program is successfully completed.

The courts heard an average of 3,000 low-level and nonviolent felony cases annually between 2016 and 2021. The court’s annual report shows how many of these defendants enter each diversion program. But it does not include demographic information or completion rates. And when cases are dismissed or expunged they are impossible to track in court data – the records disappear. So, even after several calls to the public defender’s office, prosecutor’s office and probation department, we still don’t know whether a record of successful diversion completions and expungements exists. And we still don’t know how many people qualify for diversion but don’t enter into a program, and why.

Over the course of the next few months, The Marshall Project is  going to take a closer look into diversion programs in Cuyahoga County. We’ll share what we learn in our weekly newsletter as well as on our Testify FAQ homepage, where we’ve been answering readers’ questions. 

In the meantime, we want to hear from you! Have you been through a county diversion program — Pretrial Diversion, Early Intervention Program, Second Chance Program or Intervention in Lieu of Conviction? Tell us what happened. Do you know how court diversion programs work – or don’t work –  in the county? Tell us what you found. Share your experiences and insights by filling out this form, emailing us at testify@themarshallproject.org, or leaving us a voice message at  ‪(216) 446-5001‬. 

The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system. Through a partnership with Signal Cleveland, The Marshall Project is weaving more resident voices into its reporting and building an understanding about how the justice system works — and doesn’t work — in Cleveland.