New Models of Justice: The Familiar Faces Initiative

About the Program

Category: Criminal Justice and Public Safety (Best in Category)

Year: 2017

Jails and prisons have become one of the largest de facto providers of behavioral health care in America. This approach to crisis services is ineffective and often exacerbates behavioral health and racial disproportionality and leave many struggling to meet basic life necessities. In 2014 in King County, Washington, a large cross-sector partnership has formed to transform the current criminal justice approach to behavioral health needs, extreme poverty to one that is trauma-informed and recovery oriented. The Familiar Faces Initiative is systems mapping, design, and improvement work centered on creating a system of integrated care for complex health populations that can eventually benefit any user of publicly-funded health services. Familiar Faces defined as are a sentinel population of individuals who are frequent utilizers of jail and who also have a mental health and/or substance use condition. Familiar Faces is a Data Driven approach, with unprecedented data matching across multiple systems Familiar Faces touch. Using this data with a continuous improvement and visual mapping LEAN framework, helped our region to better understand our current state and build a future state vision that is person-centered and diversion oriented. A costing of the current state has been completed demonstrating the high cost of criminal justice system responses to cycling our Familiar Faces through the jail and courts. Six implementation strategies with early wins are currently underway, including demonstration of a flexible care management team and work on a data integration hub. Familiar Faces work is linked to other large-scale systems change efforts that address diversion from formal and costly institutional responses, the integration of physical and behavioral health treatment, housing and opiate related harm reduction efforts across our region.