Session: Examining How Increasing Opportunities for Community Integration Can Help to Address the Disproportionate Involvement of People with Mental Illnesses in the Criminal Justice System (Society for Social Work and Research 22nd Annual Conference - Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity, and Justice)

Research has demonstrated that people with mental illness have disproportionately high rates of involvement in the criminal justice system. The current approach to addressing this problem focuses on reducing future criminal justice involvement by linking individuals to mental health services. While mental health treatment is an essential resource for people with mental illness in the criminal justice system, these services have not been able to achieve the desired effect on criminal justice recidivism. A number of explanations have been offered for this lack of impact, all of which focus on new and different ways to reduce recidivism in the criminal justice system. But what if these efforts are focused on the wrong outcome? For example, successful community integration among people with mental illness is linked to a number of positive outcomes. However, very little research on justice involvement among people with mental illness focuses directly on this outcome.

This symposium presents a set of five papers that examine different aspects of community integration among people with mental illness involved in the criminal justice system. This symposium is based on the assumption that community re-integration efforts in the context of the criminal justice system has three components: access to the economic and material resources needed to rejoin the community, access to resources needed to rebuild the self, and access to resources needed to re-build social and community connections. The first paper in the symposium looks at the types of resources people with mental illness identify as needing during the reentry process from jail to community and examines how these needs evolve during the first 6 months after releases. The next two papers look at resources individuals with mental illness need to rebuild the self after involvement in the criminal justice system. One of these papers examines the processes and opportunities individuals need to support their efforts to desist from further criminal activities. The other examines levels of stigma among probationers with mental illness and how it relates to mental health service utilization. The last two papers in this symposium examine the resources people with mental illness need to develop and re-establish social and community connections. The first paper in this area examines the types of support and assistance that individuals with mental illness need to rebuild social and community connections after release from jail and how these needs evolve during the first six months after release. Then the second paper examines how the types of public spaces that people with mental illness spend time in after release from incarceration and the social connections made in these spaces can strengthen community integration efforts. This symposium will encourage social workers to identify new ways to support community integration efforts among people with mental illness in the criminal justice system that if successful, could help to reduce their disproportionate involvement in this system.