Your custody management system should cut through chaos, not add to it. You need to make data-driven decisions right now, rely on a solution that’s compliant with reforms, and know for certain your operational capability will never be compromised. That’s why we recently launched a new way of working: Northpointe Suite Custody Management.
During her first 20 years in criminal justice, working as a prosecutor and then a defense attorney, Judge Christine Carpenter saw how closely drugs and alcohol connect to crime and justice outcomes. She knew it was time to start treating substance use and abuse differently, and she became a pioneer in what we know today as Drug Courts. In the latest episode of Scaling Justice, host Sue Humphreys sits down with Judge Carpenter to hear her story.
How do jails effectively manage their already scarce resources? By knowing who needs them. Assessment tools can help you screen inmates for everything from mental health to medical well-being, suicidal tendencies, PTSD, and even potential PREA concerns. When you screen inmates at intake, you know right away what treatments, housing, and programming will be most effective for each individual, and you can make decisions that appropriately allocate resources and keep everyone safe.
Placement in restrictive housing is often an attempt to protect inmates, but it can have the opposite effect, particularly for those who suffer from mental illness. The problem is twofold: not only can solitary and restricted conditions exacerbate mental health conditions, the lack of access to treatment and programming further disrupts existing issues and can even create new ones.
Case planning: It’s an art. It’s a science. It’s a tough job. Pulling together a plan that sets the right goals on the right timeline supported by the right programming sounds as elusive as painting the perfect crooked smile on the Mona Lisa, and in a way, it is. But with skill, experience, and supportive programming, it can be done.
In the CCM, a network of components work together to power the business of your court, and each component accomplishes a specific function. This gives courts the flexibility to mix and match components based on their needs and easily swap them out as needs evolve. To future-proof, courts need a strong foundational case management system that will fully meet their needs now and be component-ready for the future.
Data is central to the criminal justice decisions that affect lives, families, and communities every day. It drives more equitable outcomes, helps objectivity reign, and supports healthy communities. But how do we know the data is right? How do we know we can rely on it? Learn what data quality means for criminal justice practitioners and what each of us can do to make it better.
You’ve implemented a risk and needs assessment. Your team is using the data to inform decision-making. Now what? To maintain the health of your agency’s evidence-based practice and find out how effective your efforts are at reducing recidivism, your assessments require assessments of their own. As soon as you have enough data, your agency needs to launch a Validation Study, and then a few years after that, an Outcomes Study.
Some suicides can’t be prevented, but it’s our responsibility to try. Jails today are facing lack of funding, lack of resources for treating substance abuse issues and mental illness, and myriad other challenges that make it difficult to meet every inmate’s needs, but when it comes to suicide prevention, we have to stay vigilant.
For decades, the primary way jails and prisons have attempted to mitigate this elevated risk and keep mentally ill inmates safe was to keep them separated from the general population. This makes sense: When vulnerable inmates aren’t exposed to potential predators, they’re substantially less likely to be victimized.
