Community behavioral healthcare’s role in preventing crime and increasing public safety is one of our country’s best-kept secrets. And that’s a shame.

A few months ago, news reports focused on a third straight year of decreased crime rates across the United States, surprising law enforcement officials and other experts who predicted just the opposite, given the high rate of unemployment and the economic recession. In previous periods of economic stress, crime rates increased. Yet preliminary statistics for 2009, released by the FBI in late December, showed that rates for all types of crime had again decreased from the year before.

As analysts struggled to explain this anomaly, few (if any) mentioned the role of community behavioral and mental health services. Yet many health care professionals in the field know how important these efforts have been in this regard — and how much more can be accomplished.

Community behavioral and mental healthcare serves as an important partner for the criminal justice system, whether by providing treatment which prevents behaviors that could bring people into contact with law enforcement; training officers in how to deal with people with mental illness who are in crisis; or preventing recidivism by ensuring continued and coordinated treatment for people involved with the justice system, leaving the justice system, or both.

In these difficult financial times, it is especially important that our public works systems recognize and embrace their interrelatedness and work together to maximize public resources. At the same time, we must educate the public about how effective treatment for mental illness and additions disorder reduces crime, avoids expensive incarceration, helps people remain in or re-enter the community as contributing citizens, and enhances the quality of life of everyone in the community.

The interface between our public works systems often is frayed, if it exists at all. Yet there are pockets of excellence around the country that provide models for collaboration and cooperation, with promising results in both individual outcomes and taxpayer savings.

Collaboration Is Key -

The work of mental and behavioral healthcare organizations around the nation helps prevent crime, reduce recidivism, and divert people with mental illness and substance use issues from incarceration into less expensive, and more effective, community-based treatment. These groups have sought creative ways to collaborate with the criminal justice system. In the past decades, it has been learned that:

>> Any cross-system program or strategy must be built on a firm foundation of mutual respect and understanding and on relationships that both grow out of and are nurtured by the collaboration.

>> Planning needs to be deliberate and incremental, with both short- and long-term common goals.

>> Processes, strategies, and results should be monitored and evaluated, and improvements should be made on the basis of findings.

>> Communication, including sharing and celebrating results, should be structured and ongoing.

>> Collaborations must be cost effective and sustainable, even in tough times. This is supported by the mutual advocacy and identification of new opportunities that evolve out of collaborative relationships, further strengthening commitment, and magnifying the impact of strategies and programs.

This is basic community development. It can be slow and at times frustrating, but experience has demonstrated that it is worth it — and that no substantive and lasting change can happen without it.

These relationships and tools expedite communication between the community behavioral health treatment provider and the jail’s treatment provider, ensuring that members receive support in navigating the criminal justice system while maintaining coordination of care.

Programs are being implemented today that are significantly decreasing the likelihood that a individuals suffering from mental illness or addiction disorder will be detained in the jail system. Additional organizations have also begun training forensic peer mentors to provide support and advocate for members involved with the criminal justice system and is again offering crisis intervention training to law enforcement throughout the US.

Participants in the mental health court experienced a 50 percent overall reduction in subsequent criminal charges in the 2 years after being in the program. For example, the most recent annual figures for diversion programs in Tucson City Court and Pima County Justice Court show graduation rates of 97 percent and 92 percent, respectively — a total of 627 members of these community mental health organizations who avoided incarceration and had charges dropped.

The result has been fewer people with mental illnesses falling through the cracks. They have escaped the revolving door of the criminal justice system and are now experiencing meaningful recovery and success for the first time in their lives. There are innumerable people who have graduated from mental health court: even people the professionals thought would not be successful.

Current Conditions Demand Creativity

Collaborations are especially critical now. Federal and state governments face historic budget shortfalls, just as expenditures on corrections across the country are nearing a staggering $70 billion annually, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Some states are releasing inmates early, and many are increasingly relying on community supervision as an alternative to expensive incarceration.

At the same time, publicly funded behavioral health services — the very resources that can help ensure the success of these alternative justice approaches — are in grave danger of being cut.

With states struggling to cut costs and few lawmakers willing to consider new revenue sources, the result could be a mad, self-defeating scramble for funding among different systems and stakeholders. Alternatively, the behavioral health industry’s proactive engagement with criminal justice could create collaboration instead of chaos and lead to thoughtful changes and strategies that result in real improvements at both the systems and individual levels — not only to make the best use of dwindling dollars but to create stronger, more efficient, more effective, and more humane systems in the long run.

The status quo is being shattered by fiscal realities. We can seize this opportunity to create partnerships with criminal justice and to educate decision makers and the public about community behavioral healthcare’s critical role in the safe diversion and release of people with substance use issues and mental illness. We can make real connections between community behavioral healthcare and criminal justice. And by promoting our accomplishments to the larger community, we can emphasize our contribution to public safety.