Collaborations Between Criminal Justice and Mental Health Systems for Prisoner Reentry

OBJECTIVE: This study assessed reentry programs throughout the nation for people with mental illness who were leaving prisons or jails and developed a classification of service strategies based on practices that are emerging in the field in response to this need. METHODS: A national survey identified service strategies that assist people who are incarcerated in prisons or jail and have a mental illness reenter the community. Data were used to develop a typology of reentry service strategies. RESULTS: Fifty-eight reentry programs were identified. Program descriptions were developed for 50. Findings supported the use of a 2x2 typology of initiatives, with one factor being whether the criminal justice or mental health system initiated the program and the other being the degree of collaboration between the two systems. CONCLUSIONS: If the funding trend indicated by this survey continues, the criminal justice system will become a primary funder of treatment services for offenders with mental illness who are returning to the community. No one knows how this shift in funding will affect the provision of mental health services

The Validity of Self-Reported Criminal Arrest History Among Clients of a Psychiatric Probation and Parole Service

Self-report data have consistently demonstrated acceptable reliability and validity in prior studies by exhibiting high correlations with other criterion related measures of criminal frequency and arrest history. Mental health factors and substance abuse factors are suspected to affect the quality and accuracy of self-reported data. This analysis sought to examine the impact of major mental illness and substance abuse factors on the validity of self-reported criminal history data as given by clients of a psychiatric probation and parole service. After controlling for socio-demographic variables, the number of officially recorded arrests, high number of lifetime hospitalizations and overall years spent in jail significantly explained the number of self-reported arrests. The predominance of the official record in explaining self-reported arrest history suggests that self-reported arrest history data given by a psychiatric offender population is as valid as that given by general offender populations. Substance abuse factors and mental illness factors did not affect the quality and accuracy of self-reported arrest history

Balancing Accessibility and Selectivity in 21st Century Public Mental Health Services: Implications for Hard to Engage Clients

This research highlights the importance of expanding examinations of service accessibility for hard to engage client populations to include assessments of individuals’ ability to gain entrance to services and the system’s ability to meet the service needs of particular client populations. The results of this research provide a framework to support these examinations. The increasing levels of selectivity and targeting of mental health services to particular client populations found in this study raise fundamental questions about the goals of service accessibility in 21st century public mental health services generally, and for hard-to-engage clients particularly. These findings also point to the need for examinations of the eligibility criteria and gatekeeping mechanism that are used to target services to particular client populations to determine if they are working as intended and to assess what impact these mechanisms have on hard to engage clients’ ability to gain entrance to needed services

How Police Officers Assess for Mental Illnesses

This study examined how police officers assess for mental illnesses and how those assessments vary by location. Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 officers working in two police districts in one city. Findings from the study indicate that officers make assessments based on information from dispatch, collateral contacts and behavioral observations on the scene. The study also found that neighborhood context shaped the assessment process due to variations in types of information that were available to officers in different locations. The findings indicate that there is a need to improve the quality of all three sources of information

Conceptualizing Restorative Justice for People with Mental Illnesses Leaving Prison or Jail

Individuals with psychiatric disabilities who are involved in the criminal justice system face a number of challenges to community integration upon release. There is a critical need to develop and evaluate interventions for these individuals that connect them to the community by enhancing naturalistic social connections and helping them to participate meaningfully in valued roles. The purposes of this article are to describe, provide a theoretical rationale, and propose a conceptual model for the use of a particular restorative justice model, circles of support and accountability, to meet this need. We describe the principles of restorative justice (repairing harm, stakeholder involvement, and the transformation of community and governmental roles and relationships) and how these map on to elements of the circles intervention. These elements include a focus on community participation, positive social support, democratic decision making, collective ownership of crime problems, and connection to community-based resources. We then suggest how changes in identity transformation, moral development and motivation, and collective efficacy might mediate relationships between these intervention elements and community integration outcomes. Finally, we encourage the systematic evaluation of the circles intervention for people with mental health conditions leaving custody and provide recommendations for policy and practice

The Limits of Citizenship: Rights of Prisoners and ex-Prisoners in USA

Contrary to popular beliefs and commonly held rhetoric, rights are not naturally given to people/residents/citizens. Very few, if any, rights are inherently granted by virtue of being born a human being. Although the authors of the Bill of Rights (in the USA) as well as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights want us to believe that these rights are innate, in fact they were fought for and only barely achieved. At any given time, there are counter forces that actively push to minimize and reverse rights that were gained after long and hard struggles. For example, in the United States the “sacred” right for privacy was vastly violated with the signature and support of President George W. Bush soon after the attack of September 11, 2001 was carried out within the boundaries of the country. This is but one example where rights are not guaranteed forever and are only in place so long as there are enough people actively fighting to keep them and, if possible, to expand them. My argument, though my data are mostly US-based, is that the rights of prisoners and ex-prisoners are an excellent measure and estimate for the strength of human rights in a given society. The more punitive and exclusionary are the policies towards prisoners and ex-prisoners, the less protected are the rights of citizens in general. The more a society excludes prisoners and ex-prisoners, the more ready it is to limit the rights of other members of that society. I would welcome a comparative study of this topic to assess which societies treat prisoners and ex-prisoners more humanly and which in a more exclusionary manner

The Impact of Mental Illness Status on the Length of Jail Detention and the Legal Mechanism of Jail Release

Objective: This analysis investigated whether persons with serious mental illnesses have longer jail detentions than other detainees and whether they are released by different legal mechanisms. Methods: Jail records and mental health service records from a Medicaid database were matched for all admissions to the Philadelphia jail system in 2003. Survival analysis techniques were used to compare length of jail stays of persons with and without serious mental illnesses (N=24,290). Serious mental illness was defined as a diagnosis either in the schizophrenia spectrum (DSM-IV code 295.XX) or of a major affective disorder (DSMIV code 296.XX) recorded in Medicaid records (2001–2003). Mechanisms of release were also examined for those with release dates before September 1, 2005 (N=20,573) Results: Just over 50% of the 1,457 persons with serious mental illnesses were released from jail within 30 days of incarceration, compared with 56% of the other detainees. Mental illness status was not found to be a significant predictor of longer detentions. Forty-nine percent of those with serious mental illnesses were released from jails through unpredictable release mechanisms, such as bail, release from court, or withdrawal of a bench warrant, whereas only 19% were released through mechanisms that had release dates that allowed adequate time for discharge planning. Conclusions: The findings suggest that reentry programs and other jail-based interventions for persons with mental illnesses should ensure that they have the capacity to rapidly identify and serve clients with shorter and more unpredictable stays or risk not being responsive to the needs of a substantial proportion of this population

Community Participation Among Individuals with Serious Mental Illnesses Leaving Jail

Studies have found that higher levels of community participation are associated with a number of positive outcomes such as increased recovery and quality of life. People with serious mental illnesses (SMI) leaving jail face a number of barriers that limit their ability to participate in community activities. In this paper we examine whether the combined experience of mental illness and recent discharge from jail furthers the community isolation that is already experienced by individuals with serious mental illnesses. This analysis found that people with SMI recently released from jail had significantly lower levels of community participation in terms of overall number of community participation days and activities, number of time spent in activities individuals identified as important, and on measures of sufficiency related to the time spent engaged in these activities. Community participation is a key component of community re-integration for people with SMI leaving jail. The results of this study show that services for people with SMI leaving jail need to include interventions that foster engagement in community based activities

Examining Criminogenic Risk Levels Among People with Mental Illness Incarcerated in US Jails and Prisons

This study examines criminogenic risk levels of individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) involved in the justice system compared to justice-involved individuals without mental illness. The sample (N = 436) consisted of ninety-three individuals with SMI incarcerated in a county jail in a mid-size Midwest city, 217 individuals with SMI incarcerated in a state prison in the US Northeast, and 126 individuals without mental illness incarcerated in a state prison in the US Southwest. Results indicated that people with SMI incarcerated in jail and prison had higher overall criminal risk levels than prison inmates without mental illness. Results further demonstrated that, on average, higher percentages of persons with SMI had high/very high criminogenic risk scores. Finally, we noted that persons with SMI scored higher on most of the eight criminogenic risk domains measured by the Level of Service Inventory. These findings are possibly the most compelling to date in the growing body of literature demonstrating that justice-involved people with SMI have elevated criminogenic risk comparable to or greater than their non-mentally ill peers involved in the justice system. Consequently, treatment programs and interventions for justice-involved individuals with SMI need to explicitly target criminogenic needs into treatment efforts

What is the Total Deuterium Abundance in the Local Galactic Disk?

Analyses of spectra obtained with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite, together with spectra from the Copernicus and IMAPS instruments, reveal an unexplained very wide range in the observed deuterium/hydrogen (D/H) ratios for interstellar gas in the Galactic disk beyond the Local Bubble. We argue that spatial variations in the depletion of deuterium onto dust grains can explain these local variations in the observed gas-phase D/H ratios. We present a variable deuterium depletion model that naturally explains the constant measured values of D/H inside the Local Bubble, the wide range of gas-phase D/H ratios observed in the intermediate regime (log N(H I} = 19.2-20.7), and the low gas-phase D/H ratios observed at larger hydrogen column densities. We consider empirical tests of the deuterium depletion hypothesis: (i) correlations of gas-phase D/H ratios with depletions of the refractory metals iron and silicon, and (ii) correlation with the molecular hydrogen rotational temperature. Both of these tests are consistent with deuterium depletion from the gas phase in cold, not recently shocked, regions of the ISM, and high gas-phase D/H ratios in gas that has been shocked or otherwise heated recently. We argue that the most representative value for the total (gas plus dust) D/H ratio within 1 kpc of the Sun is >=23.1 +/- 2.4 (1 sigma) parts per million (ppm). This ratio constrains Galactic chemical evolution models to have a very small deuterium astration factor, the ratio of primordial to total (D/H) ratio in the local region of the Galactic disk, which we estimate to be f_d <= 1.19 +/-0.16 (1 sigma) or <= 1.12 +/- 0.14 (1 sigma) depending on the adopted light element nuclear reaction rates.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figure