If you’re arrested on a serious offense you’ll appear in Superior Court and they’ll hand you a form called PTI, and you’ll have to fill it out to be considered eligible for it. PTI is pretrial invention. Basically the court sometimes take cases and they decide to use their discretion and put you into a diversionary program.

You have to considered -- you first have to go down to the county and be interviewed by the probation department, they’ll make the recommendation, and then the prosecutor’s office reviews it. Let’s say for low-level theft offenses or low-level drug offenses and maybe even some type of assault situation, you might be admitted into the PTI program or pretrial intervention.

During which time they can give you this probation program for a period of anywhere from six to 36 months during which time you may be ordered to get drug treatment or you have to pay restitution to the victim. You may be subject to maintaining full-time employment. I mean there’s a variety of conditions that the court can place on it, but like I said you’re not guaranteed admission into this program. You have to have both the prosecutor’s office and the probation department decide that you’re a good candidate; and secondly, you have to have the judge make a decision that he thinks you would benefit and society would not be in peril by your admission into this program.