2019 – Page 2

Document Tag: 2019

Report Identifies Emerging Best Practices In The Management Of LGBTI People In Correctional Settings

The report documents that sexual and gender minority individuals who are incarcerated experience exceptionally high rates of sexual victimization in U.S. prisons and jails as compared to other inmates. It also notes that LGBTI people are disproportionately represented in corrections, most likely due to high rates of harassment and rejection that LGBTQI youth face from their families, schools, and communities, which contributes to the early involvement of LGBTI people in the juvenile justice system. The report also notes that historically same-sex behavior and gender variance were criminalized in the U.S. until recently.

Workforce Issues in Corrections

The backbone of corrections is its workforce. The corrections sector relies on qualified, trained and dedicated staff for effective, professional operations. But today, correctional administrators, particularly those running prisons and jails, are grappling with severe workforce challenges that directly impact mission performance. Those challenges include staff recruitment, selection and retention, training and agency succession planning.

Jail Incarceration: A Common and Consequential Form of Criminal Justice Contact

Although jails are both common and consequential, affecting millions of individuals annually, they are a relatively understudied aspect of the criminal justice system. In this review, we first document the prevalence of jail incarceration, highlighting how jail incarceration has risen in tandem with the more commonly examined prison incarceration. Next, we describe the population of individuals in jail, paying particular attention to the heterogeneous and disadvantaged nature of this population. We document how jail incarceration is measured, demographically and in household surveys, and argue that jail incarceration has lasting and profound consequences for individuals, families, and communities. We conclude the review by suggesting directions for future research. Given the common nature of jail incarceration—in conjunction with the fact that jail incarceration creates, sustains, and perpetuates inequality—a better understanding of the prevalence, correlates, and consequences of jail incarceration is critical for fully understanding the link between the criminal justice system and inequality.

Sufrin Speaks on Reproductive Health Care for Incarcerated Women

Currently, there are no mandatory standards of care for pregnant women in U.S. prisons and jails, and many incarcerated women receive inadequate obstetric care. These facts prompted Sufrin to study pregnancy outcomes in U.S. prisons through funding she received from NIH’s Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health Program.

Principles of Community-based Behavioral Health Services for Justice-involved Individuals: A Research-based Guide A bridge to the possible

This document is intended to assist community-based behavioral health providers in their clinical and case management practice with people with mental and substance use disorders who are currently involved with or have a history of involvement in the adult criminal justice system. The focus of this document is on services provided in the community rather than in institutional settings (i.e., jail, prison, or hospital). The information provided is intended to be used in practice, and is therefore appropriate for any staff providing direct services in community settings. However, to practice these principles, organizations may need to reconsider staff training, evidence-based practices, and other programmatic elements to ensure that staff providing direct services have the information, policy support, and resources needed. This document is also intended for agency leaders and program developers who are responsible for shaping how their organizations deliver community-based services. The Principles provide a foundation for realizing a quality, community-based behavioral health treatment system that is responsive to all individuals with mental and substance use disorders and skilled in serving those with histories of justice involvement.

Beyond Estelle: Medical Rights for Incarcerated Patients

Like most other individuals, prisoners sometimes need medical attention for ailments, injuries and diseases. However, there appears to be a misconception about prisoners’ medical rights among physicians, medical administrators, prison and jail staff, and law enforcement officials. This article will review some of the medical rights and court rulings that are pertinent to prisoners, including issues such as medical decision-making, medical information privacy, force-feeding and forcible medical procedures.

Caring for Those in Custody

A new study by the RAND Corporation and the University of Denver (DU) analyzed insights from a working group of experts with practical expertise in and knowl-edge of inmate mortality trends.

Effectiveness of Police Crisis Intervention Training Programs

Approximately 1,000 people in the United States were fatally shot by police officers during 2018, and people with mental illness were involved in approximately 25 percent of those fatalities. Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training is a specialized police curriculum that aims to reduce the risk of serious injury or death during an emergency interaction between persons with mental illness and police officers. CIT has been implemented widely both nationally and internationally. Given the increasing resources devoted to CIT, efforts to analyze its effectiveness and outcomes relative to other approaches are important. Studies of CIT and similar interventions are found within both the mental health and the criminal justice arenas, which use very different terminologies, approaches, and outcome studies, rendering unified analyses challenging. This article describes the CIT model and reviews several recent systematic analyses of studies concerning the effects of CIT. Studies generally support that CIT has beneficial officer-level outcomes, such as officer satisfaction and self-perception of a reduction in use of force. CIT also likely leads to prebooking diversion from jails to psychiatric facilities. There is little evidence in the peer-reviewed literature, however, that shows CIT’s benefits on objective measures of arrests, officer injury, citizen injury, or use of force.

Policing Women: Race and gender disparities in police stops, searches, and use of force

Jails have been described as the criminal justice system’s “front door,” but jail incarceration typically begins with the police, with an arrest. Before any bail hearing, pretrial detention, prosecution, or sentencing, there is contact with the police. But despite their crucial role in the process, we know less about these police encounters than other stages of the criminal justice system

The Effects of Incarceration and Reentry on Community Health and Well-Being

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop on June 6, 2018. The workshop’s mission was to investigate the connection between incarceration and health inequities to better understand the distributive impact of incarceration on low-income families and communities of color. Topics of discussion focused on the experience of incarceration and reentry, mass incarceration as a public health issue, women’s health in jails and prisons, the effects of reentry on the individual and the community, and promising practices and models for reentry. The programs and models that are described in this publication are all Philadelphia-based because Philadelphia has one of the highest rates of incarceration of any major American city. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions of the workshop.