Aligning Health and Safety: A Tool for States to Improve Local Justice & Behavioral Health Systems
This tool—produced by the Aligning Health & Safety project—helps state leaders in all three branches of government navigate common challenges that stand in the way of improving local criminal justice and behavioral health systems. It’s designed to help state policymakers and staff:
- Understand levers available across all three branches of state government to support local community needs—from legislation, regulatory, and rule changes to budgets, administrative policies, and leadership approaches;
- Learn what strategies other states have used to advance similar priorities; and
- Gather key resources and best practices to support effective implementation.
Learn about other ways Aligning Health & Safety can help your state.
How the Tool Works
For each of the policy areas in this tool—Collaboration, Data Collection and Information Sharing, and Aligning Funding—we highlight:
- Foundational state policy goals;
- Key questions states should ask themselves as they engage in cross-system policy initiatives;
- Important considerations;
- State examples; and
- Relevant resources.
As users move through the tool, they can click Add to My Resources buttons to store content in one place for download upon completion. Watch the video to see how:
While policy work at this intersection can benefit from an expansive definition of “behavioral health,” which can include intellectual and developmental disabilities and traumatic brain injuries, for the purposes of this tool, “behavioral health” refers to mental illness, substance use disorders, and co-occurring disorders.