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