Center for Justice & Health

The Center for Justice and Health is focused on justice, safety and wellbeing for people with complex behavioral health conditions. Through the cultivation of cross-systems collaborations, the Center for Justice and Health builds practical and scalable solutions that center on the person in need. The Center for Justice and Health’s work is guided by two principles: “person-centered” policy reform and procedural justice. We employ three primary strategies:

Transforming the Culture of Crisis Response seeks to develop, deploy, evaluate and expand 911 mental health emergency response to ensure that mental health crises can be safely and swiftly identified at the point of call, reducing the likelihood of arrest and incarceration. Through our Person-Centered Triage Approach (PCTA), we are: lowering arrest and use-of-force rates by expanding the ability of call center professionals to more accurately gauge the needs and preferences of callers and to prioritize a health-forward response. With a focus on vulnerable and underserved communities, PCTA is helping restore relationships between first responders and local communities and repair social divisions.

Download Our PCTA Policy Briefing

Increasing Access to Justice aims to research, develop and design collaborative strategies to ensure that incarcerated individuals with behavioral health conditions do not languish in jails and prisons where their conditions worsen, and they lose access to effective care.
Research shows that people with mental illness are at the highest risk of suicide in the first four to seven days of initial detention. To address this, the Center for Justice and Health’s First 48 initiative seeks to help magistrates quickly identify detainees at risk and connect them to potentially lifesaving treatment. By improving outcomes for people with mental illness early in their interaction with the criminal legal system, the First 48 Initiative impacts all downstream activities within that system, allowing the courts to focus on their role of providing a procedurally-just, timely and fair process.

Decreasing Intergenerational Incarceration, seeks to address systemic and multi-generational involvement in the criminal justice system. Studies show that four in 10 children in America grow up with a parent who has spent time in prison, has been convicted of a felony or is facing a criminal charge. The Center for Justice and Health produces research, policy recommendations, and designs upstream solutions to address adverse and systemic vulnerabilities associated with parental incarceration. Through this work, Meadows Institute staff work with courts and justice officials to improve care coordination building procedural pathways to deploy effective prevention and intervention practices in a community setting.

The work conducted through the Justice & Health Center would not be possible without our collaborative, talented and passionate team members.

For more information about the Justice & Health Center,
contact Yolanda Lewis
Executive Vice President for Justice & Health and
Executive Director, Center for Justice & Health