Exploring racial disparities in sex trafficking special docket court programs.

Purpose: The United States criminal legal system has a long-standing and well-documented history of perpetuating racial disparities in health and well-being through inequitable policing, sentencing, and incarceration practices. In the last decade, the criminal legal system has re-considered their response to women arrested for solicitation via sex trafficking specialty courts.

Methods: The current study leverages publicly available data from one large Midwestern county to explore the presence of racial disparities within women's referral to, election to participate in, and success within one specialty court program for women in the sex trade.

Interpersonal process features of collaboration between probation and behavioral health practitioners.

This study sought to identify and conceptualize the central interpersonal process features that comprise good collaboration between behavioral health practitioners (BHPs) and probation officers (POs). Eighteen POs and 21 BHPs from geographically adjacent jurisdictions in a Midwestern state each participated in one of six focus groups. Researchers systematically coded focus group transcripts for interpersonal collaborative themes using both inductive and deductive strategies.

Communication and collaboration in a drug court team.

A multidisciplinary team is a hallmark feature of drug courts and other specialized treatment dockets. Comprised primarily of practitioners from the criminal legal system and mental health and addictions services treatment systems, team members exchange information and engage in shared decision-making. Though practitioners in these contexts have some guidance regarding organizational and structural elements needed to facilitate efficient and effective communication and collaboration, less is known about the role individual team members' actions and behaviors play in this process.

A Data-Driven Response to the Addiction Crisis in Hamilton County, Ohio.

Context: For more than a decade, the state of Ohio has been an epicenter of the opioid crisis. Multiple interventions have been deployed to address this crisis and reduce opioid overdoses and overdose deaths in the state. The Hamilton County Addiction Response Coalition (HC ARC) and its strategic, countywide prearrest diversion (LEAD) and deflection (QRT) programs have been at the forefront of this effort in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Opioid-specific medication-assisted therapy and its impact on criminal justice and overdose outcomes.

Background: The overlap between justice system involvement and drug use is well-documented. Justice-involved people who misuse opioids are at high risk for relapse and criminal recidivism. Criminal justice policymakers consider opioid-specific medication-assisted therapies (MATs) one approach for improving outcomes for this population.

PROTOCOL: Opioid-specific medication-assisted therapy and its impact on criminal justice and overdose outcomes.

Background: The overlap between criminal justice system involvement and drug use is well-documented, and criminal justice agencies have been particularly overwhelmed by the recent opioid epidemic. Treating opioid (and other substance) addiction as a means to reduce risk for future criminality and improve public safety is inherently a responsibility for the criminal justice system. In turn, the criminal justice system has a responsibility to manage and treat addiction among the individuals under its purview.

Comparing Costs of Traditional and Specialty Probation for People With Serious Mental Illness.

Objective: Specialty mental health probation reduces the likelihood of rearrest for people with mental illness, who are overrepresented in the justice system. This study tested whether specialty probation was associated with lower costs than traditional probation during the two years after placement in probation.

Methods: A longitudinal, matched study compared costs of behavioral health care and criminal justice contacts among 359 probationers with mental illness at prototypic specialty or traditional agencies.

Comparing Public Safety Outcomes for Traditional Probation vs Specialty Mental Health Probation.

Importance: Probation is a cornerstone of efforts to reduce mass incarceration. Although it is understudied, specialty probation could improve outcomes for the overrepresented group of people with mental illness.

Objective: To test whether specialty probation yields better public safety outcomes than traditional probation.

Social networks and treatment adherence among Latino offenders with mental illness.

Mental health treatment adherence is often required for offenders with mental illness supervised on probation and parole. However, research on offenders with mental illness has largely overlooked cultural and ethnic responsivity factors that may affect adherence to treatment. Latinos are a quickly growing subgroup of offenders whose social networks differ in meaningful ways from European Americans' (e.

Applicability of the Risk-Need-Responsivity Model to Persons With Mental Illness Involved in the Criminal Justice System.

Objective: National efforts to improve responses to persons with mental illness involved with the criminal justice system have traditionally focused on providing mental health services under court supervision. However, a new policy emphasis has emerged that focuses on providing correctional treatment services consistent with the risk-need-responsivity (RNR) model to reduce recidivism. The objective of this review was to evaluate empirical support for following the RNR model (developed with general offenders) with this group and to pose major questions that the field needs to address.

High-fidelity specialty mental health probation improves officer practices, treatment access, and rule compliance.

Many probation agencies in the United States assign offenders with mental illness to relatively small specialty caseloads supervised by officers with relevant training, rather than to large general caseloads. Specialty caseloads are designed to improve the process and outcomes of probation, largely by linking these probationers with psychiatric treatment and avoiding unnecessary violations. In this multimethod, longitudinal matched trial, we tested whether a prototypical specialty agency (n = 183) differed from a traditional agency (n = 176) in officers' practices, probationers' treatment access, and probationers' rule violations.

Care, control, or both? Characterizing major dimensions of the mandated treatment relationship.

Current conceptualizations of the therapeutic alliance may not capture key features of therapeutic relationships in mandated treatment, which may extend beyond care (i.e., bond and affiliation) to include control (i.

The utility of patients' self-perceptions of violence risk: consider asking the person who may know best.

OBJECTIVE The authors compared the predictive accuracy of two risk assessment methods that are feasible to use in routine clinical settings: brief risk assessment tools and patients' self-perceptions of risk. METHODS In 2002-2003, clinical interviewers met with 86 high-risk inpatients with co-occurring mental and substance use disorders (excluding schizophrenia) to carefully elicit the patients' global rating of their risk of behaving violently and to complete two brief risk assessment tools-the Clinically Feasible Iterative Classification Tree (ICT-CF) and the Modified Screening Tool (MST). Two months after discharge, patients were reinterviewed in the community to assess their involvement in violence.

Firm, fair, and caring officer-offender relationships protect against supervision failure.

A growing body of research suggests that high quality dual role relationships between community corrections officers and offenders reduce risk of recidivism. This study assesses whether this finding generalizes from offenders with mental illness to their relatively healthy counterparts. More importantly, this study tests the possibility that this finding is spurious, reflecting the influence of pre-existing offender characteristics more than a promising principle of practice.

If you want to know, consider asking: how likely is it that patients will hurt themselves in the future?

Although self-harming behavior is a common and costly problem for psychiatric inpatients released from the hospital, standardized tools that assess patients' risk for self-harm are rarely used in clinical settings. In this study of dually diagnosed psychiatric inpatients (N = 147), we assessed the utility of patients' self-perceptions of risk in predicting self-harm in the community. Patients' self-perceptions of risk predicted self-harm 8 weeks after discharge from the hospital (Lag 1; area under the curve [AUC] = 0.

Correctional policy for offenders with mental illness: creating a new paradigm for recidivism reduction.

Offenders with mental illness have attracted substantial attention over the recent years, given their prevalence and poor outcomes. A number of interventions have been developed for this population (e.g.

Social networks and social control of probationers with co-occurring mental and substance abuse problems.

Probationers with co-occurring mental and substance abuse problems (PCPs) are both subject to considerable social control, and at high risk of probation failure. In this study, we screened 601 probationers for symptoms, interviewed 82 identified PCPs about their relationships, and then followed these PCPs for eight months to record treatment nonadherence and other probation violations. First, PCPs' social networks were small, heavily comprised of professionals and opposing forces who engaged in risky behavior, and saturated with pressure to adhere to treatment.

Utility of the Revised Level of Service Inventory (LSI-R) in predicting recidivism after long-term incarceration.

Assessing an inmate's risk for recidivism may become more challenging as the length of incarceration increases. Although the population of Long-Term Inmates (LTIs) is burgeoning, no risk assessment tools have been specifically validated for this group. Based on a sample of 1,144 inmates released in a state without parole, we examine the utility of the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) in assessing risk of general and violent felony recidivism for LTIs (n = 555).

Reliability and validity of two self-report measures of psychopathy.

The present study assessed the psychometric properties and construct validity of two self-report measures of psychopathy in a male-college sample: the Levenson Psychopathy scales (LPS; Levenson, Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995) and the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI; Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996). Both the LPS and the PPI demonstrated good internal consistency, although selected items from the PPI correlated weakly with their respective factor scores, suggesting the need for further investigation of the factors' item content. The PPI showed stronger validity than the LPS in terms of convergent and discriminant validity of its factor scores and factor associations with two criterion variables, aggression, and anxiety.