Crisis Response

most recently the director of Behavioral Health Research and Programming at the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice in New York City. Prior to that, she was the director of the Substance Use and Mental Health program at the Vera Institute. She received her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Alex was a project coordinator for the Institute for Evaluation Science in Community Health, which is housed in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. As a project coordinator, she oversaw a variety of research projects, including one examining the Pittsburgh region’s emergency response to mental health crises, and another evaluating the region’s Crisis Intervention Team training for police officers. She earned her BS in psychology and BA in French from the Pennsylvania State University and her MPH at the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh.

planning and implementation efforts to address criminal justice functions from initial detention through reentry, including a focus on people with mental illnesses. She has also managed the development of training materials on mental health courts and on judicial responses to the prevalence of individuals with mental illnesses involved with the criminal justice system. She has written on dispute systems design for state trial courts, pretrial responses to people with mental illnesses, information sharing between criminal justice and mental health systems, and mental health court design and implementation. Before joining the CSG Justice Center, she was a management consultant with McKinsey & Company in New York. Hallie received a BA from Brown University and a JD from Harvard Law School.

from 2008 to 2014. In that role, Risë provided staff support to the Johnson County Criminal Justice Advisory Council and facilitated the coordination of criminal justice-related activities for the district court, the sheriff’s and district attorney’s offices, the Department of Corrections, the Court Services Department, and the Johnson County Mental Health Center. Her work in Johnson County involved both the juvenile and adult divisions, and major projects included a Justice and Mental Health Intercept Project, Second Chance Reentry, the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, and Justice Reinvestment at the local level. Risë previously served as the chief court service officer of the 10th Judicial District Court in Johnson County and began her career in criminal justice as a juvenile probation officer in 1979. Risë holds a BS in criminal justice from Wichita State University and an MPA from the University of Kansas.