FY 2010 JMHCP Grant Program

The Bureau of Justice Assistance's (BJA) Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Program (JMHCP) is funded through the Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act of 2004 (Public Law 108-414), which was reauthorized in 2008 (Public Law 110-416). The primary purpose of JMHCP is to increase public safety by facilitating collaboration among the criminal justice, juvenile justice, and mental health and substance abuse treatment systems to increase access to mental health and other treatment services for those individuals with mental illness or co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders. Jurisdictions are eligible to apply for planning, planning and implementation, or expansion funding through JMHCP.

The county of Contra Costa will use $249,322 in JMHCP Category 2: Planning and Implementation funding to enhance its Behavioral Health Court services. The funding will support an enhanced Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) project, Project Integration, that will focus on training and management strategies within the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office, and will continue to provide CIT training for other law enforcement (LE) agencies across the County.

The program will conduct the following:
-Expand CIT training to put enough CIT officers in place to serve mentally ill consumers and demonstrate the power of CIT strategies to defuse crises and bring about positive outcomes;
-Train Sheriff's patrol and detention supervisors to ensure that CIT philosophy and strategies become routine;
-Target CIT training for custodial officers to accelerate partnerships with jail mental health staff and improve outcomes for the incarcerated mentally ill;
-Expand awareness among all LE personnel of the connections between mental illness and criminal behavior; and
-Implement data systems to facilitate efficient use of CIT resources, assess its effectiveness and strengthen the argument for further expansion among LE officers, mental health practitioners, the public and public officials.

CA/NCF