An inmate looks out of one of the segregation cells at the Greene County Jail. / Dean Curtis News-Leader

Proposed new tax would not be salve Grant will help inmates with mental illnesses get treatment.

A new collaborative project, now in its infancy, is aimed specifically at helping people who suffer from a serious mental illness get into treatment and stay out of jail. Report by News-Leader.com.

The partnership between law enforcement, jail officials, prosecutors and area mental health advocates has started to identify those stuck in a cycle of incarceration.

Parts of the collaboration project are funded by a two-year, $200,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, which was awarded to the Greene County Jail.

Simultaneous to the jail’s project, Springfield police have begun to implement the city’s first comprehensive program focused on people suffering with mental illness.

Project participants hope the collaborative programs will free up city and county resources chronically drained by a small group of untreated mentally ill citizens.

Police Chief Paul Williams said the collaboration project, described as being on “the ground floor,” will need public and private support to combat what is widely perceived as a community problem.

“The standard has always been that if someone is doing something illegal, they go to jail,” Williams said.

“Really, the underlying issue could be mental illness.”

The police

Since beginning to work with the other officials in January, Springfield police have identified 16 people in the center-city area who suffer from mental illness and who cross paths with law enforcement often.

Now, when police respond to minor incidents involving these individuals, instead of taking them to jail, they are often diverted to available community resources.

Williams said, so far, two of the 16 are in treatment.

“The rest, we are still working with,” he said.

If successful, the list could be expanded to include those who are recognized as untreated mentally ill and live in other parts of the city.

The department’s new program is modeled after mental health programs at the Memphis Police Department in Tennessee and the Tulsa Police Department in Oklahoma, where Williams served for more than 20 years.

Williams hopes that, in time, local community groups, law enforcement and private citizens work together to help make the program successful.

“There needs to be more community involvement as opposed to just ignoring the problem.”

The grant will cover some specific instruction called Crisis Intervention Team training, a major component of the police department’s program.

That training focuses on the interaction between the mentally ill and law enforcement and is one of Greene County Deputy Cathy Ussery’s specialties.

“It kinda changes your tactics,” said Ussery, Crisis Intervention Team training coordinator with the sheriff’s office.

“Some tactics work better for someone with mental illness.”

The training

Ideally, officers who complete the 40-hour crisis intervention training are able to spot the difference between a psychotic episode, a drug-induced craze or something else entirely.

To date, only about six Greene County deputies — including Ussery — have received the specialized training.

“We are not a pioneer by any means,” said Sheriff Jim Arnott.

Ussery hopes to extend the training to more deputies as well as other police forces in nearby municipalities, including Springfield police.

“It’s something that the community desperately needs,” she said.

“We want to be able to train as many officers as possible.”

Williams said his goal is to have about 10 percent of the police force receive the specialized training.

One of the major goals of the training is to educate officers on community resources available to people suffering from mental illness.

For now, though, those resources are limited.

Beyond cooperating with family members, area law enforcement have two choices for mentally ill offenders: emergency room or jail.

“As of right now, there is nothing really in between,” Ussery said.

She and Williams said finding a viable alternative is a priority goal of the project.

“It would be great if we had something like that,” Williams said.

“But we aren’t there yet.”

The released

Another grant-funded aspect of the project is helping mentally ill inmates transition to life on the outside.

To that end, participants can receive medications, counseling sessions, a month of housing and bus passes to make it to appointments.

While the services that can be provided are short- term, they are designed to fill the gap to enable a needy person to sign up for Medicaid or veteran’s benefits if they qualify, or at least give the person a little time to get a job.

So far, about 50 former inmates are in various stages of the program.

“Hopefully they won’t end up in that revolving door of coming to the jail over and over,” said Melissa Ussery, mental health coordinator for the Greene County Jail.

(Melissa Ussery is Cathy Ussery’s sister-in-law).

In applying for the grant, county officials noted:

“Greene County Jail has become the largest mental health care facility in the area.”

People with mental illnesses are usually not taking medication when they arrive at the jail because they can’t afford them or have not been clinically diagnosed. Emergency rooms are the main medical provider for the uninsured.

“They are often rearrested and the cycle continues,” the application reads.

When the two-year grant expires, participants hope to have provided screening, assessment and discharge planning for about 400 people with mental illness who are detained for non-violent offenses.

As for the 50 former inmates taking advantage of the services, it isn’t yet clear if the project has been effective at limiting jail stints.

Melissa Ussery said patience is needed when treating people with mental illness. She said many also suffer from addiction and getting out of jail could lead to relapse.

But she added: “Relapse is a part of recovery.

“So, it depends on how you measure success.”

In proposing a new law enforcement tax, Greene County officials speak of many problems, holes and issues with the local criminal justice system.

They also speak of how a new 1/4-cent or 1/8-cent tax could provide remedies on some fronts.

No officials, however, have spoken about revenues from such a tax easing the problem with mentally ill inmates at the jail.

With a new tax, many new county-paid jobs have also been suggested or recommended, some at the jail. None, however, have been suggested as a way to deal with mentally ill inmates or reduce their numbers.

In addition, no one interviewed for this two-day report spoke of a new tax as the pathway to addressing this problem.

Movement toward any sort of solution, experts and officials say, would require more funding not for law enforcement but for resources for the ill outside jail and outside law enforcement, for instance at mental health facilities.

An additional wise move, experts say, would be to change commitment laws to force the seriously mentally ill to take help or to take medication.

The first grant, awarded by the U.S. Department of Justice, is a Second Chance Act Grant totaling $410,467. These funds, in addition to $41,100 in-kind state matching funds, will be used to support treatment and recovery services for female offenders at the State Correctional Institution at Muncy who meet certain requirements. Report by PR Newswire.

“This grant allows us to develop and test a well-designed strategy for offenders with dual disorders,” Corrections Secretary John Wetzel said. “This increases the likelihood of successful offender re-integration and improved public safety by reducing the likelihood of future criminal activity.”

Approximately 100 to 150 female offenders with dual co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders, who are within 18 months of their parole eligibility date and who will return to Allegheny, Dauphin or Philadelphia counties, will benefit from this grant.

The funds will be used over a two-year period to support a specialized therapeutic community at SCI Muncy. The program will provide integrated mental health and substance abuse treatment services in addition to supportive services addressing education, family relations, safety, and housing. The DOC will partner with the Department of Health’s Bureau of Drug and Alcohol Programs, the Department of Public Welfare’s Office of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, local service providers and community organizations to ensure services will continue for participating offenders after their release from prison.

“This grant award allows everyone involved in treatment and recovery for these specific offenders to work together toward a common goal,” said Mary Finck, manager of the DOC’s re-entry program. “We are pleased we were selected for this grant and will work hard to use it to improve public safety through specialized treatment of offenders.”

The second grant has been awarded by the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice totaling $209,323.

“This grant is another big win for us,” Wetzel said. ”It was very competitive, and only five awards were made nationwide.”

The grant award, made under the “Criminal Justice Researcher-Practitioner Fellowship Placement Program,” will fund a one-year project that places an academic professor from the University of Maryland as an “embedded criminologist” within the DOC to provide technical assistance with the agency’s research agenda. Dr. Kiminori Nakamura will be funded to serve as a regular part-time DOC employee for the period of the grant.

“The benefit to the DOC will be to have easy, onsite and regular access to an expert in the field of criminal justice research,” said Bret Bucklen, director of the DOC’s Office of Planning, Research and Statistics.  “The benefit to the researcher is that he will be able to apply academic work to real world policy issues, will have ready access to data and will be able to seek publication of the results of the joint research endeavors.”

“University of Maryland’s Criminology & Criminal Justice department consistently ranks as the top criminal justice program nationwide, so we’re getting a good resource in Dr. Nakamura,” Wetzel said.

The purpose of the research is to determine at what point after release from prison a parolee has no greater statistical likelihood of getting arrested as the average citizen. While this will be Nakamura’s primary interest, the main point of the grant is to use his expertise to provide assistance with research on DOC interests.

The grant also will fund two graduate students to assist the DOC and Nakamura. It also will provide funds for the DOC to purchase software needed by DOC research staff for mapping and population projections.

The DOC’s Office of Planning, Research and Statistics will coordinate this grant, which is currently slated to start Jan. 1, 2012.

The future of the Missouri River Drug Task Force, an anti-narcotics unit that includes 10 police detectives from seven counties in southwestern Montana, may depend on whether its officers can confiscate enough drug money to pay their own salaries. That’s because the task force, like hundreds of other specialized state and local law-enforcement teams across the country, relies heavily on a federal funding stream that Congress slashed by 67 percent late last year … Similar scenarios are playing out across the nation, as cash-strapped law-enforcement teams from California to Pennsylvania come to terms with potentially crippling cuts in funding under a key federal grant program. State and local governments, struggling as the U.S. economy falters and tax revenues flatten, are unable to help.

Stateline covers this story in detail.

Last year, Montana received about $1.2 million from the program, of which 90 to 95 percent went to the seven drug task forces in the state … The Missouri River Drug Task Force serves Helena, Lewis and Clark County and other surrounding communities. The task force, mainly funded by federal grant money, faces a cut of 67 percent for the next year, as do the rest of the nation’s multijurisdictional drug task forces. Task force detectives were instrumental in solving the last five homicides in Helena, all of which were drug-related. They used networks of informants to gather incriminating information on the murders. Investigators say they also spend many hours a week on assaults, burglaries and other drug-related crimes.

The full article from the Helena Independent Record has a lot more information.

Source:  IJIS email

“I was frustrated,” said Klecker. “I knew that my (Intensive Supervision Officers) were doing a very good job, but we were not being effective. And I [was] troubled with it.”

Through NCIC he found ” The Eight Principles of Effective Intervention” and he knew it would help.

The Eight Principles of Effective Intervention say in order to successfully release an offender from probation, the corrections facility needs to help change the way the offender thinks and reacts to particular situations. The principles are as follows: Assess actuarial risk and needs, enhance intrinsic motivation, target intervention, skill train with directed practice, increase positive reinforcement, engage ongoing support in natural communities, measure relevant processes and practices, and provide measurement feedback. ISOs will utilize pro-social or rehabilitation interventions to emphasize positive behaviors. Research by the Center for Effective Public Policy says “punishment and deterrence-driven approaches used in isolation have negligible impact or no impact.” But when using positive reinforcement, revocation rates decrease and re-arrest rates can be lowered by as much as 20 percent …

Between July 1, 2006, and today, SFTCC has already reduced by 59.1 percent the number of felony offenders who are sent to prison for violating the conditions of their probation.

This is, of course, re-entry at the basic level. More details can be found in the Dodge City Daily Globe.