Crisis Intervention/Behavioral Health Specialist

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 fiscal year (FY) 2016 Smart Supervision Program (SSP) seeks to improve probation and parole success rates and reduce the number of crimes committed by those under probation and parole supervision, which would in turn reduce admissions to prisons and jails and save taxpayer dollars. Funds can be used either to implement evidence-based supervision strategies or to innovate new strategies to improve outcomes for supervisees. The goals of this program are to develop and test innovative strategies to implement evidence-based probation and parole approaches that improve supervision success rates, thereby increasing community safety, and reduce violent and other crime by effectively addressing individuals’ risk and needs and reducing recidivism.

The recipient will use award funds to implement the Crisis Intervention/Behavioral Health Specialist project. The project purpose is to assist the courts and adult probation in responding to behavioral health-related crises and to allow staff to consider non-jail responses for mental health stabilization. The main goal is to improve supervision outcomes and reduce recidivism by providing an alternative to local jail incarceration as a response to crisis and non-crisis situations involving defendant behavioral health issues. The proposed initiative will improve supervision strategies to reduce recidivism by decreasing utilization of the Jail resulting in fewer and shorter jail stays and giving supervision staff more time to work with offenders to achieve the goals of their individualized case plan. The program will provide services to 1500 probationers over the award period, most are moderate to high risk but some are low and low moderate with high need scores with behavioral health needs.

CA/NCF