Recognizing that criminal justice policymakers and practitioners often interact with other community service systems relevant to the needs of offenders, the current resource provides a checklist for developing and maintaining a “data warehouse” that houses information from multiple community service agencies and organizations.
“Data warehouses” are central repositories that house information from multiple sources, can consolidate individual-level and system-level data, and enable data tracking in identifying relationships and trends. Information obtained from a data warehouse can be a valuable resource for a partnership between criminal justice and behavioral health agencies. Such a data-informed partnership can assist in diverting people with mental illness or substance-use disorders from the justice system to mental health or drug treatment services. The checklist provided in this resource will assist agencies involved in the criminal justice-behavioral health partnership assess their current information technology (IT) infrastructure and guide the development of a cross=system data warehouse. The checklist is designed to be completed in three phases as communities develop their data warehouse. These phases are planning, development, and implementation/maintenance. Once each phase is completed, the interagency group overseeing the warehouse should assess progress and agree on next steps before moving to the next phase.