Smart Justice Behavioral Health Jail Diversion Project

About the Program

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

Year: 2018

Dallas County’s Smart Justice Behavioral Health Jail Diversion Project began in 2015 with a planning grant to a local foundation to develop a system-wide consensus on strategies needed to improve public safety by diverting justice-involved severely mentally ill defendants away from the justice system and into treatment and housing. Primary goals were to take the burden off police and the jail, and handle these persons more safely and humanely; particularly for lower risk defendants more in need of treatment than incarceration. Additionally, a goal was to reduce the number of mentally ill being arrested, and becoming trapped in the system. The project first established prevalence/need; then mapped, redesigned and implemented new system processes within the Courts, Jail and community to more rapidly and efficiently identify, divert, release, bond-supervise, and treat mentally ill defendants in the community. Since the April 2017 launch; of the 51,616 persons booked in all were screened for behavioral health need, 12,079 identified with possible behavioral health concerns, 1731 met the criminal justice requirements for assessment and release consideration, and 456 of those were successfully released, connected to treatment and bond supervised for the Court (often with a direct “warm handoff”).