The Allegheny County (Pennsylvania) Mental Health Court has served as a dedicated criminal court docket for defendants with underlying mental health diagnoses since 2001. During the period from 2010 through 2016, this evaluation found mental health court participants had significantly fewer new arrests in the three years following the conclusion of their cases than similar defendants who went through traditional court.
How effective is therapy or treatment when it's used instead of incarceration, and what are the challenges to conducting it inside the coercive context of the criminal justice system? In this episode of New Thinking, host Matt Watkins is joined by clinical psychologist Jacob Ham who works with justice-involved young people affected by trauma, and John Jay College's Deborah Koetzle who evaluates programs across the country intended to help participants rebuild lives outside of the justice system.
This Urban Institute evaluation of two mental health courts in New York City finds that mental health court participants are significantly less likely to recidivate, as compared to similar offenders with mental illness who experience business-as-usual court processing.
This fact sheet details the implementation of innovative teleservices programs in seven jurisdictions around the country. The jurisdictions featured in this publication use teleservices to increase treatment court capacity, overcome treatment barriers, supervise participants, and provide training for staff.
This study suggests relying on summary risk scores alone to decide on treatment options for an important, hitherto under-emphasized, subpopulation of drug court participants may be leading to counter-productive outcomes.
Aimed at statewide problem-solving court systems, this fact sheet addresses the importance of strategic planning for goals such as the creation of performance standards, the efficient allocation of resources, and the development of statewide training programs. It also outlines how the Center for Court Innovation’s guided strategic planning process can help strengthen problem-solving court operations.
This webinar discusses strategies for enhancing drug court capacity, meaning getting more of your target population into drug court. Strategies include universal screening and assessment, arrest data analysis to reduce racial disparities, and case “portability” (transferring cases to a jurisdiction with a drug court).
This study examines the validity of the COMPAS with offenders who have a serious mental illness. A widely used risk-needs assessment tool, the COMPAS was found to be a good predictor of re-arrest with this population, although it was more effective in distinguishing low-risk offenders from all others than in identifying those who pose a medium as opposed to a high risk of re-arrest. Overall, approximately two-thirds of study-participants were classified as low risk.
Learn about ways state drug court coordinators can support local drug court programs in ensuring that they are good consumers of treatment services and promoting the use of best practices by treatment and related providers.
This fact sheet addresses the challenges and opportunities that arise from sentencing reform, outlining the ways in which technical assistance can help drug courts assess and respond to these changes.
