Center for Justice & Health

Transforming the Culture of Response: This practice area seeks to develop, deploy, test, and expand tools and model practices to ensure that mental health crises can be safely and swiftly intercepted at the point of call, vastly reducing the likelihood of arrest and incarceration. (The Center for Justice Health collaborates closely with our Health and Public Safety Team in this practice area.)

Access to Justice: This practice area seeks to research, develop, and deploy strategies to ensure that individuals with behavioral health conditions do not persist in jails and prisons where their condition worsens, and they lose connection with effective care and care pathways.

Youth and Family (Justice Involved): This practice area seeks to produce research and design a multi-system strategy to address systemic multigenerational involvement in the criminal legal system (and upstream) due to ambiguous loss, grief, and related trauma.

Innovation, Law & Health: This practice area intends to seed a dynamic collaboration with law and medical schools, to produce high-impact research and case studies addressing gaps in service/policy to decriminalize mental illness and construct a framework for “digital determinants” of access.

The Center’s mission is to realize justice, safety, and well-being for people with complex behavioral health conditions, by cultivating cross-system collaboration to build practical and scalable solutions that center on the person in need. The primary population of focus is those “living the experience,” including but not limited to the person in crisis or need, family members, caregivers, practitioners, system professionals, and emergency or crisis response agencies.

Jails and emergency rooms across the U.S. are too often the default destinations for people who have an untreated mental illness. There is no dispute that the justice system is the wrong place to treat mental illness. Yet, thousands of people frequently cycle in and out of the justice system without a viable connection to appropriate care that is equitable and deflects them from long-term justice involvement.

Our work advances multi-disciplinary system transformation though collaborative, data-driven program and policy guidance. We engage state and national system leaders to curate a one-stop repository of information for policy and decision-makers, helping them make informed systemic changes that keep people with complex mental and physical health needs in treatment and out of the justice system.