Warren County Prosecutor-Led Mental Health Diversion Program.

AuthorDrew, Meredith

In recent years, there has been increasing support for the potential of front-end interventions to keep offenders with histories of mental illness and substance abuse out of jail and connected to community-based services. Defendants who are diverted are less likely to be cut off from treatment and less likely to experience the collateral consequences of incarceration, including loss of employment and strained family relationships. The legal ramifications of diversion are also lessened compared to those of conviction and incarceration. Research has shown that diversion programs lead to reductions in recidivism rates and delay the time to rear-rest for participants (Rempel, Labriola, Hunt, Davis, Reich, & Cherney, 2017) (1).

An area that has received less attention in the literature is how rural jurisdictions with limited resources confront the challenges of mental health and substance abuse. The limited availability of treatment services in rural areas creates a strain on the legal system because the mental health support that is required is lacking (Travers, Gustafson, Preston, & Hudson, 2009) (2). While diversion programs offer a promising alternative to incarceration for individuals with mental illness and substance abuse, they require the availability of services and the means to access treatment. This is one of the challenges the Warren County Prosecutors Office (WCPO) aimed to overcome in implementing its mental health diversion program.

In 2009, the WCPO implemented a diversion program for defendants with serious mental illness and co-occurring disorders that contributed to the commission of a crime (See Shelton, 2020 for a detailed discussion of the development of the Mental Health Program and its process for diverting defendants). (3) At the time of its implementation, the WCPO recognized that there were many people in the local jail, over a third of the population, who could benefit from a model of support and rehabilitation in dealing with their legal requirements. The intent of the program is to identify, evaluate, and link participants to appropriate services quickly, focus their legal requirement on rehabilitative services, and avoid/decrease further legal involvement. The diversion program works with participants to increase their successful completion of court requirements and in doing so, aims to improve relationships with the community. In conjunction with this effort, staff associated with the program are trained in evidence-based programs, skills, and techniques.

In 2015, the WCPO received a grant from the New Jersey Attorney General's Office to continue and expand the program. To date, the program has served close to 140 defendants. The grant enabled the WCPO to partner with academic researchers to conduct a study with a small sample of program participants to gain insight into how the program operates and how participants are responding to the treatment model.

THE STUDY

The purpose of this research was to further understanding of the applications of prosecutor-led diversion and its potential impact on defendants with histories of mental illness and/ or substance abuse, particularly in rural settings. The goals of the project were to conduct process and outcome evaluations of the Mental Health Program to identify successes and challenges in the implementation and to determine if the program is successful in improving outcomes. A mixed methods approach was utilized. Data collection occurred from 2017-2019.

Process Evaluation

To examine the challenges and successes in the implementation of the program, various types of data were collected. Several meetings were held over a two-year period with program staff to document processes related to program referral, intake, development and monitoring of the treatment plan, and program discharge including perceptions of program strengths and weaknesses. These conversations included a discussion about the nature of the relationship between the WCPO, law enforcement, probation, and treatment providers. Interviews with program participants also included questions related to successful/unsuccessful aspects of the program model. Finally, to examine program capacity, data was obtained from the WCPO to document the number of clients enrolled, rejected, successfully completed, and discharged due...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT