Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Texas, and California each report competency-restoration timeliness differently — different legal mechanisms, different metrics, different reporting cadences. This page compares them only where a comparison is genuinely valid.
Built and maintained by Sudhanshu Rai, an
independent researcher; not affiliated with any court, agency, or party. Descriptive measurement
only — no causal claims.
Why three panels, not one chart. These five states don't share a single metric. California reports waitlist stock (a headcount of people pending placement), not wait-days, at all. Texas has no binding deadline in effect. Colorado splits into two tiers with different standards. Putting all five on one axis would manufacture a comparability that doesn't exist — so each panel below compares states only on an axis they actually share, and a state missing from a panel is labeled with why, not silently dropped.
Panel 1 · always comparable
What the law requires, right now
Each state's current binding (or, for Texas, proposed) admission-deadline standard,
in days. Not a ranking of outcomes — just what's on the books.
WashingtonTrueblood, inpatient
7 days
OregonMink v. Baldwin
7 days
ColoradoTier-1 (acute)
7 days
ColoradoTier-2 (rest)
28 days
CaliforniaStiavetti, final step
28 days
TexasEzra ruling, Jul 2026
21 days
Ordered but not yet enforced — compliance benchmarks are still being set, and Texas is appealing. Shown for comparison, not as a currently-binding number.
Panel 2 · comparable only where measured
Actual wait vs. that state's own standard
The most recent actual wait reading for each state, against the standard from Panel
1. Each bar is annotated with its own caveats — these are not on equal footing with each
other (different recency, different definitions).
Washingtonvs. 7d standard, 2026-05
5d
0.7× standard — median, inpatient restoration
Oregonvs. 7d standard, 2025-11
19.1d
2.7× standard — average, admission wait
Coloradovs. 28d Tier-2 standard, 2026-04
57d
2.0× standard — blended Tier-1+Tier-2 (not tier-specific). See Colorado's own page for the tier-split figure.
California excluded from this panel. California's public data tracks
waitlist stock (how many people are pending placement), not wait-days — the
actual metric its 28-day standard governs. See
California's own page for detail.
Texas excluded from this panel. HHSC stopped publishing a wait-time
figure for the statewide max-security queue after its 2023-08 report; the newer report format's
own footnote states people "do not directly admit from the maximum security list." An earlier
version of this panel paired that queue's count with a wait-days figure from a different, smaller
population (patients already assigned to a specific hospital) — a real bug, now removed. See
Texas's own page for its most recent comparable reading and why it's
no longer current.
Panel 3 · each state's own metric
Waitlist stock, where tracked
How many people are currently pending placement, and the direction of change from
the prior reading — each state on its own count, not normalized against the others (the
underlying systems are very different sizes).
Oregonwaitlist stock, 2026-03
60
vs. 54 in 2025-11
Coloradowaitlist stock, 2024-01
391
vs. 431 in 2023-09 (-9%)
Texasmax-security waitlist, 2025-08
419
HHSC's statewide 'Maximum Security' queue; a separate non-max queue also exists (see Texas's own page)
CaliforniaIST pending placement, 2025-08
277
86% below the peak of 1953 (2022-01)
Washington excluded from this panel. Washington's public data tracks
admission throughput and compliance rate, not a comparable pending-placement backlog count.
See Washington's own page for its actual metrics.
Status
Data quality and reporting limitations
This page never computes or displays a 5-state average of any kind — the states measure genuinely different things on different clocks, and an average across them would manufacture a comparability the underlying data doesn't support. See each state's own page for its full series.
Use the data
Cite, download, or get in touch
Cite this dataset
Competency Restoration Observatory (2026). Five-state competency-restoration comparison [dataset].
competencyrestoration.org · data current through see each state's own page · page generated August 2026
· concept DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21436450 (always resolves to the latest dataset version — a
version-pinned DOI matching this exact data window follows at the next Zenodo release).
Every figure regenerates from the public source reports by code — fully reproducible.
The Zenodo deposit already includes real, MIT-licensed extraction code for the frozen
Washington/Oregon study (an extraction pipeline plus its own verification gate) — but this
dashboard's own full 5-state codebase (adapted from that study's code, plus Colorado, Texas, and
California from scratch) is a separate, not-yet-public repository. A dedicated "Build &
Replicate" walkthrough page and that public release are both planned but not yet published.
Researchers, clinicians, monitors, and reporters welcome —
especially if you know of more recent source reports for this state. Every correction to an
already-published number is logged on the Changelog page and in
this RSS feed — nothing changes silently.