Vera’s Substance Use and Mental Health Program (SUMH) conducts applied research to help public officials and community organizations develop empirically driven responses to the substance use and mental health needs of people involved in justice systems. SUMH staff collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data to examine the interaction between public health and justice systems and evaluate existing programs to understand the experiences of those affected by psychiatric disorders or substance use and policies that prolong their involvement in the justice system.
Featured
Creating a Culture of Safety
Sentinel Event Reviews for Suicide and Self-Harm in Correctional Facilities
Since 2011, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), through its Sentinel Events Initiative, has been investigating the feasibility of using a sentinel events approach to review and learn from errors in the criminal justice system such as wrongful convictions, eyewitness misidentifications, or incidents of suicide and self-harm in custody. Recogniz...
Impact Evaluation of the Adolescent Behavioral Learning Experience (ABLE) Program
In 2012, New York City launched the Adolescent Behavioral Learning Experience (ABLE) program, a large-scale initiative serving 16- to 18-year-old youth held at the Rikers Island jail complex. The ABLE program provided Moral Reconation Therapy to young people with the aim of improving individual outcomes and reducing the number of youth who were rea...
First-Episode Incarceration
Creating a Recovery-Informed Framework for Integrated Mental Health and Criminal Justice Responses
The number of people diagnosed with serious mental illness in the U.S. criminal justice system has reached unprecedented levels. Increasingly, people recognize that the justice system is no substitute for a well-functioning community mental health system. Although a range of targeted interventions have emerged over the past two decades, existing ap...
Related Work
With Public Support, States Continue to Embrace Drug Reform—and Save Lives
New reporting from the New York Times yesterday estimates that more than 59,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2016—the largest annual jump ever recorded in U.S. history. With drug overdoses now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, the consequences of these numbers cannot be underestimated. However, despite new federal sentencing...
Blog Post
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Karina Schroeder
Changing Directions
The Intersection of Public Health and Criminal Justice
A New Normal
Addressing Opioid Use through the Criminal Justice System
The United States is experiencing an epidemic of drug overdose deaths that cuts across economic, racial, and geographic boundaries. In the midst of this devastation, people are struggling to find ways to save the lives of their community members. While the “war on drugs” created tough enforcement policies that resulted in a bloated justice system, ...
A New Normal
Addressing Opioid Use through the Criminal Justice System
The United States is experiencing an epidemic of drug overdose deaths that cuts across economic, racial, and geographic boundaries. In the midst of this devastation, people are struggling to find ways to save the lives of their community members. While the “war on drugs” created tough enforcement policies that resulted in a bloated justice system, ...
#sayhername
The Health Consequences of Mass Imprisonment for (Black) Women
Prof. Hedy Lee discusses how mass incarceration affects the health and wellbeing of the predominantly poor and minority women who routinely deal with the absence of their husbands, fathers, and brothers. Poor and minority women, particularly African American women, face markedly higher rates of chronic diseases, such as obesity and diabetes, and po...
Recent Wins on Marijuana Signal a Change in Drug Policy Nationally
This election season, many Americans overwhelmingly voted in favor of marijuana reform. California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada approved the legalization of recreational marijuana, while voters in Arkansas, Florida, and North Dakota approved new medical marijuana initiatives. Montana also voted to ease restrictions on its already existing med...
Blog Post
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Kristi DiLallo
Shining a spotlight on mental health and police shootings
The Boston Globe’s infamous Spotlight team recently published an investigation on yet another way people with mental health disorders are underserved and harmed by the criminal justice system: being shot by police. Spotlight uncovered that in Massachusetts, between 2005 and 2015, more than 40 percent of people killed by police were suicidal or show...
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Chelsea Davis
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Leah Pope
The Intersection of Public Health and Criminal Justice
Interview with David Cloud
Mass incarceration is one of the major public health challenges facing the United States, as the millions of people cycling through the courts, jails, and prisons every year experience far higher rates of chronic health problems, substance use, and mental illness than the general population. In this interview, David Cloud, Senior Program Associate...
What Congress lifting the federal ban on needle exchange programming could mean for law enforcement
At the close of 2015, two Republican legislators, House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell led the charge to effectively lift the federal ban on providing operational support for syringe exchange programs (SEPs). Because of the increase in potential funding, such harm reduction programs will now further ex...
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David Cloud
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Chelsea Davis
First Do No Harm
Advancing Public Health in Policing Practices
Millions of medically vulnerable and socially marginalized people cycle through the criminal justice system each year due to serious structural problems entrenched in American society. The absence of a coherent and effective social safety net means that people lack access to physical and mental health care, social services, and housing options in t...
Our current justice system isn't doctor recommended
I am asked daily why The California Endowment—a health foundation where I serve as a program director—is interested in criminal justice reform. I now have an answer that doesn’t require me to say one word. The Endowment and the American Public Health Association (APHA) created the video you see below to show the painful impact mass incarceration ha...
Blog Post
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Barbara Raymond
Prevention and care can reduce suicides in jail
The numbers released earlier this week by the Bureau of Justice Statistics paint a grim picture. Suicide—as it has been every year since BJS began collecting data in 2001—is the leading single cause of death for people incarcerated in local jails, accounting for a third of all facility deaths in 2013. This is a 9 percent increase from 2012. Local g...
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Ayesha Delany-Brumsey
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Chris Munzing