Recognizing a high number of people with mental illnesses entering the Henrico County, Va. jails, in 2010, the Henrico County Sheriff’s Office, in partnership with Henrico Area Mental Health & Developmental Services (HAMHDS), initiated a Sequential Intercept Model process to identify places in the system where they could reduce the number of people with mental illnesses in the jails. Currently, about 18 percent of people who are booked into the county’s two regional jails have a mental illness. As a result, Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) for law enforcement officers and mental health and substance use treatment programming inside the jails were developed and implemented to address the needs of their population.
