The Center for Behavioral Health,
Justice, and Public Policy (CBHJPP)
There are over 11,000,000 adults booked into U.S. jails each year and greater than 2 million people currently incarcerated in the U.S. Persons with mental illnesses are arrested at disproportionately higher rates than persons without such disorders and the rate of mental illness among incarcerated offenders in jails and prisons is at least 2-3 times higher than that found in the general population. The majority of this population has co-occurring addictive disorders. By all accounts, this population’s behavioral health needs are grossly underserved while they are incarcerated and little is known about the treatment received by this population once they return to community.
The Center for Behavioral Health, Justice, and Public Policy is involved in four types of activities:
knowledge generation about the characteristics of persons with mental illnesses in correctional settings and the effectiveness of interventions treating their illnesses;
program development to identify and implement promising practices on how to divert individuals from criminal justice settings into treatment, and assist persons with mental illness leaving justice settings integrate into community;
knowledge dissemination across behavioral treatment and corrections disciplines to provide state of the art information on what works, for whom, and under what circumstances; and
knowledge translation to provide relevant empirical data to inform policymakers and policy at the local, State and national level.
The Center contributes to the field, our community, and vulnerable citizens by integrating these activities across multiple systems.
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