Research Agenda

Our research is organized around four focus areas and seeks to understand why people with mental illness have interactions with the criminal justice system and what can be done to effectively respond to and manage their interactions. These areas of focus are driven by the need to develop effective intervention models. They include:

• Identifying factors that increase (or decrease) the risk of arrest and incarceration. Precursors to criminal encounter research addresses factors affecting the likelihood of a criminal justice encounter. The goal is to identify personal, system, and community factors affecting the risk of a criminal justice encounter.



• Determining what interventions are most effective in reducing the risk of such contact. Findings from the Precursors research will be used by stakeholders and researchers to design interventions that minimize the rate of these encounters by reducing risk factors and increasing protective factors.



• Detecting mental health problems among individuals in the criminal justice system and arranging for appropriate treatment or services. Processing dynamics research addresses responses to the involvement in the criminal justice system among people with mental illness. This work emphasizes different systems’ responsiveness toward identifying those with mental illness and how these systems coordinate services to meet treatment needs at entry into the jail/prison and upon release to the community.



• Engaging those who are detained in jail/prison with treatment and connecting them to services upon release. Processing dynamics research addresses gender- and culturally based-specific needs as well as the additional needs associated with co-occurring conditions such as substance abuse problems and HIV/AIDS.

Active Research
Completed Research