Members of Vera Institute’s Substance Use and Mental Health program poured over data collected in 2008 from four Washington, D.C. criminal justice agencies and the Department of Mental Health to determine the mental health needs of arrestees and to assess if those needs were being met. Their findings, offered in Closing the Gap: Using Criminal Justice and Public Health Data to Improve the Identification of Mental Illness include:
About 33 percent of adult DC residents arrested during June 2008 had some indication of mental health need in partner agency records between 2006 and 2011
Many of those arrested with mental health needs were not known to community mental health care providers
Criminal justice agencies often failed to identify the mental health needs of the people that they encoun¬tered.
Thirty-three percent of the arrestees known to the Department of Mental Health as having a psychotic spectrum disorder or bipolar disorder were not identified by any of the criminal justice agencies
Closing the Gap offers recommendations on how to better identify mental health needs of arrestees, how to better serve them, and how to create and implement better policies to make sure arrestees and inmates get the help that they need.
Source: The Fortune Society
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