correctional healthcare conference
web admin: 650-479-4449

Five Studies: Mental Health Courts Are Finding Their Footing – Pacific Standard

pill judgementSource: Five Studies: Mental Health Courts Are Finding Their Footing – Pacific Standard

Predictive Analytics and the Future of Jail Health Care

From my inbox to yours!

Dear Colleague:

From its inception, Community Oriented Correctional Health Services (COCHS) has viewed connectivity not only as a way to link justice-involved people to services but also as a way to link people in the criminal justice and health care sectors to information.

COCHS CIO Ben Butler is an expert on the myriad issues involved in creating information connectivity between criminal justice and health care. With the rise of big data come new opportunities for magnifying the power of information technology. In a new issue paper, Predictive Analytics in Criminal Justice and Health Care: Three Case Studies, Ben examines how health care providers are working with criminal justice providers to use predictive analytics for reducing incarceration, improving health, and maintaining public safety. Although this work is still in its early stages, the kinds of initiatives discussed in Ben’s paper will no doubt someday be the norm.

Meanwhile, Health Affairs, the nation’s leading health policy journal, recently published Ben’s letter suggesting that jails offer an interesting opportunity to test the efficacy of health information exchange (HIE) for improving the health of a very vulnerable population.

As you know, COCHS has widely disseminated the message that significant numbers of people in jail are there because of untreated behavioral health problems.  When these problems continue to go untreated in jail, they can lead to behavior that causes inmates to wind up in solitary confinement, where conditions are even more detrimental to mental health issues.

Last week, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote an important concurring opinion for Davis v. Ayala, in which he noted the “human toll wrought by extended terms of isolation” and the inadequacy of current judicial mechanisms for determining the role of solitary confinement in inmate sentencing. Citing COCHS collaborator Dr. Homer Venters, Justice Kennedy wrote that recent research detailing the psychological toll of confinement on inmates challenges us to re-examine the way we view punishment.

With his concurrence, Justice Kennedy has opened the door for the Supreme Court to examine the conditions of confinement and the effects of these conditions on inmates’ mental health. Justice Kennedy foresees a time when the judiciary will “determine whether workable alternative systems for long-term confinement exist, and, if so, whether a correctional system should be required to adopt them.”

With your help, we have brought these alternative systems closer to becoming a reality.

Steven Rosenberg

President, COCHS

 

 

Fox News attacks a provision of the (ACA) allowing inmates to access Medicaid

Fox News attacked a provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that allows certain inmates to be enrolled in Medicaid as “ridiculous and unfair to every taxpayer.” But according to health care and correctional experts, increasing access to health services reduces both the costs associated with incarceration and decreases inmates’ chances of being incarcerated again.

How Obamacare May Lower the Prison Population More Than Any Reform in a Generation

How Obamacare May Lower the Prison Population More Than Any Reform in a Generation.

Steven Rosenberg: Implications of the Affordable Care Act for the Criminal Justice System | Vera Institute of Justice

Steven Rosenberg: Implications of the Affordable Care Act for the Criminal Justice System | Vera Institute of Justice.

Medicaid and Financing Health Care for Individuals involved with the Criminal Justice System

justice center 12.13 medicaid

all care is cheaper outside the walls

http://issuu.com/csgjustice/docs/aca-medicaid-expansion-policy-brief/1?e=0

1 2