Lane County Combating Mental Illness: Intersecting Community Supervision & Services (Lane CMI).

Lane County, Oregon will use funding through BJA's Improving Adult and Youth Crisis Stabilization and Community Reentry Grant Program to support its Parole and Probation (P&P) and Behavioral Health (LCBH) divisions to launch the Lane County Combating Mental Illness: Intersecting Community Supervision & Services initiative (Lane CMI).
The Lane CMI seeks to develop a model of care coordination to address the fragmented state of our supervision and behavioral health systems serving adults released from prison, jail, or court systems who suffer from serious mental illness, substance use disorder, and co-occurring disorder. This community is severely impacted by the opioid crisis and legislative revisions to Ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized possession of a controlled substance. Our county's parole and probation population is subsequently forecasted to grow from 2,200 to 2,900 by 2026. Of the residents on supervision facing challenges with mental illness and substance abuse, approximately 50% are homeless and their reconviction rates exceed 40%. The most common mental illnesses to be addressed include schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Lane CMI is a planning process to develop the tools and practices to (i) synchronize P&P and LCBH's respective staffing capacity and responsibilities to engage individuals with the highest unmet need and criminogenic risk and (ii) coordinate the screening processes and collaborative case planning for more effective crisis response. Our work will be informed by Care Coordination, Integrated Health, and risk-need-responsivity implementation models to develop a universal screening tool and process to be adopted at pre-sentencing, in custody, and pre/post-release; collaborative case planning strategies to improve care navigation and management; and a performance continuous improvement process. P&P and LCBH staff will receive professional development training to improve their practices and to train their peers in the state on how to integrate risk-need-responsivity into supervision services. BJA and matching funds will be invested in new personnel, training, technical assistance, and upgrades to our mobile outreach vehicle.
Lane CMI will increase the number of individuals P&P's Mental Health Unit can serve at any given time from 135 to 180, with a total of 540 individuals during the grant period. With the support of the Sheriff's Office, District Attorney's Office, and Public Defender's unit, referrals will continue from prisons and jails, and will expand to thousands of preventative engagements in jail and pre-sentencing referrals from the courts.