Smart Thinking: Expanding Thinking for a Change Capacity through Collaboration

The Second Chance Act signed into law on April 9, 2008, provides a comprehensive response to the increasing number of people who are released from prison and jail and returning to communities, including resources to address the myriad needs of these offenders to achieve a successful return to their communities. As a complement to the Second Chance Act programs, the FY 2014 Smart Supervision Program (SSP) seeks to improve probation and parole success rates, which would in turn improve public safety, reduce admissions to prisons and jails, and save taxpayer dollars. The goal of this program is to develop and test innovative strategies to implement evidence-based probation and parole approaches that increase community safety, and reduce violent crime by effectively addressing individuals' risk and needs, and reducing recidivism.

The Maricopa County proposes the Smart Thinking: Expanding Thinking for a Change Capacity project. The overall goal is to strengthen and sustain a cross-agency Thinking for a Change program in order to reduce recidivism and increase community safety by improving the engagement and retention of 864 medium-high and high risk adult probationers in T4C groups. Maricopa County will accomplish this by collaborating with a behavioral health treatment provider to develop and implement a comprehensive evidence-based model that can be replicated by other community providers to effectively facilitate Thinking for a Change. CA/NCF