An Evaluation of the Effects of Jail Diversion and Reentry for Mentally Ill Offenders

Abstract

Jewish Family Services (JFS) is a nonprofit agency that assists mentally ill offenders in southern New Jersey. In an effort to steer misdemeanants to treatment rather than jail or probation, JFS established agreements with police to provide pre- and postbooking diversion for misdemeanants whose offenses appear to be a product of mental illness. JFS also participates in reentry planning services for incarcerated mentally ill offenders who are serving county jail sentences. Data were collected for cases involving clients who were diverted or participated in reentry and people who were referred to JFS and either were ineligible for reasons other than criminal offense type or drug and alcohol addiction or were eligible but unable to be contacted by JFS. Treatment participants remained in the community before being incarcerated for an average of 218 days longer than the members of the comparison group, and this difference remained statistically significant when controlling for other relevant variables.

KEYWORDS:

• diversion
• jail
• mental illness
• reentry
• rehabilitation

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the staff of Jewish Family Services for their help with data collection.

Notes

See Tartaro and Lester (2009) for a lengthier discussion of the management challenges associated with protecting inmates from self-harm.

Readers should be aware that the evaluation of this program was conducted by the agency that was responsible for its implementation.

See Brad v. City of New York (2000) and C.F. v. Terhune (1999) for examples of court intervention on behalf of incarcerated mentally persons with serious mental illness.

The chi-squared statistic is not presented in Table 1 for this comparison, because some expected frequencies were below 5.