Before designing a new initiative or changing an existing policy, communities first need to understand the problem that they want to fix. This involves identifying the key issue they intend to address and the root causes of that problem. It is easy for planning teams getting started in this work to become overwhelmed without a clear sense of where to start. Communities can benefit from a data- and community-driven process to build a deeper understanding of issues driving racial inequities in their criminal justice and behavioral health systems. With this knowledge—which may include a clearer sense of what is still unknown, such as gaps in data—communities can begin the work of narrowing expansive goals into manageable pieces, identifying key decision points for policy action and potential interventions to address target issues. Examples of issues to address include racial disparities in who is referred for behavioral health diversion, bias in implementation of screening tools, and data availability and integrity limitations.

Strategies to Consider

• Acknowledge the cumulative nature of racial disparities. Some jurisdictions have passed resolutions or formalized commitments to advancing racial equity broadly or in their justice systems. Public acknowledgement of how the criminal justice and behavioral health systems have contributed to overincarceration of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) people and under-resourcing of their communities can lend credibility to the initiative by beginning to build trust through accountability.

• Understand and utilize appropriate terminology when discussing racial inequities. Language has the power to build or hinder anti-racism efforts when galvanizing community engagement and support. Words have different meaning to different people based on their lived experiences. Equipping practitioners with the right tools to facilitate these critical conversations should be a preliminary step toward change.²

• Conduct focus groups, surveys, community meetings, or interviews with people with lived experience in the criminal justice and behavioral health systems, as well as organizations serving the communities most impacted by racial inequities, to understand what communities perceive the issue area or challenge to be. Use these insights to better define the problem and identify the types of solutions communities want.

• Explore if, how, and how well your community is collecting race and ethnicity data, and analyze the available data to identify disparities. Keep in mind that self-identification of race and ethnicity is the ideal way to obtain accurate data.

• Understand how decisions at different points in the system lead to disparate outcomes for BIPOC people.³ Some communities may engage in a system mapping process—such as a Sequential Intercept Model⁴ mapping—with a racial equity lens to pinpoint where to target their efforts.