“Part of the success of this has been an openness to identifying how we can do things differently in our community when it comes to mental health care and the criminal justice system,” said Paula Verrett, a NAMI recovery specialist who has worked directly with the OCMHC since its inception.
Recently, the U.S. Congress approved the $1.3 trillion Fiscal Year 2018 Omnibus Appropriations bill that would set government funding through Sep. 30, 2018. The bill provides $30.3 billion for the Department of Justice and includes $2.9 billion for various state and local law enforcement assistance grant programs.
Victim restitution can be a vitally important part of a crime victim’s recovery, yet is often poorly understood and managed by states. Very few states have been able to show substantial progress in improving restitution, but Hawaii has done so and has the data to prove it. This success story was highlighted at the National Association of Attorneys General annual winter meeting in February in Washington, DC, in the panel discussion “Helping Crime Victims Recover from Financial Losses.”
The Council of State Governments (CSG) recently announced that Megan Quattlebaum, research scholar in law at Yale University Law School and lecturer in law at Columbia University Law School, will be the next director of The CSG Justice Center.
The Judges and Psychiatrists Leadership Initiative released Practical Considerations Related to Release and Sentencing for Defendants Who Have Behavioral Health Needs: A Judicial Guide and an accompanying bench card, resources designed to assist judges in making informed connections to treatment for people who have behavioral health needs that enter their courts.
In this webinar the presenters will discuss overcoming the challenges to effective community engagement and explore how to increase the number of young people your office assists in clearing their juvenile records.
This fellowship offers students at Columbia University and community members from throughout New York an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of mass incarceration and social change.
The program provides funding for grants that work to implement measures meant to achieve reductions in pretrial misconduct and postconviction risk of reoffending.
This webinar explores ways that juvenile defenders and civil legal aid attorneys can partner to share expertise and provide essential legal representation for youth facing the collateral consequences of having criminal records.
This webinar provides an overview of the primer, Supporting People with Serious Mental Illnesses and Reducing Their Risk of Contact with the Criminal Justice System, a resource designed to help familiarize psychiatrists with the Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) Model—which is used by criminal justice professionals to identify the factors that contribute to a person’s risk of recidivism and tailor interventions based on the identified factors—and provide information on ways psychiatrists can help address the particular needs of this population.
During this webinar, judges and other court personnel learn about the tips for recognizing indications of a mental illness and/or substance use disorder in the courtroom, the process for treatment recommendation and referral for defendants with behavioral health needs, and how to collaborate with behavioral health care providers in their communities
This new journal from the National Association of Drug Court Professionals is dedicated to the topic of identifying and rectifying racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in treatment courts.
This new website from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation offers an array of resources to support jurisdictions in implementing the Public Safety Assessment in their criminal justice systems.
This brief from the California Policy Lab found that a Pre-trial Release Unit (PRU) pilot program doubled the likelihood of release at arraignment–from 14% to 28% for arrestees who received arrest-responsive interventions from the PRU.
According to the Prince William County Office of Criminal Justice Services’ 2017 Annual Report, the average pretrial daily case load increased from 352 in 2015 to 507 in 2017, saving the jail 56,894 jail bed days. And the successful compliance rates increased from 84 percent in 2015 to 89 percent in 2017.
Sending someone to prison in Pennsylvania costs around $42,000 a year by conservative estimates. So if a prosecutor is requesting a five-year sentence, they would have to justify not only an approximate $210,000 cost to taxpayers but also the decision to interrupt the convicted person’s connection to family, employment, and access to public benefits.
Too many county jails either have no standard screenings for mental illness or screenings that are subpar—turning institutions of incarceration into de facto psychiatric units.
When diversion is done well its results can be significant. Cook County’s diversion program (in Illinois), which is widely recognized as a model, is an example: a year after finishing felony diversion, 97 percent of graduates have no new felony arrests, and 86 percent have no new arrests of any kind.