Bridgeway Recovery Services with the Marion County Reentry Initiative
Marion County, Oregon
Last Updated 2018
NOTABLE FEATURES
- The Marion County Sheriff’s Department in Salem, Oregon was a Second Chance Act (SCA) Reentry Program for Adults with Co-occurring Substance Use and Mental Disorders grantee in Fiscal Year 2013
- Jurisdiction geography: Urban; 336,316 residents
- Size of correctional facilities and populations incarcerated: 450 men and women at Marion County Jail and 2,000 men at Oregon State Penitentiary
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Bridgeway Recovery Services is a community-based treatment provider that offers mental illness, substance use disorder, and problem gambling treatment. Bridgeway also serves as the lead case planner for the Marion County Reentry Initiative (MCRI), which is a collaboration including the Marion County Sheriff’s Department, Marion County Community Corrections, Oregon Department of Corrections, and Bridgeway that seeks to reduce crime and recidivism by engaging partners from community corrections, education, law enforcement, health, and nonprofit agencies in efforts around case planning and reentry. As the lead case planner and behavioral health care provider, Bridgeway partners with the other agencies and departments to coordinate and provide services for people reentering the community in Marion County.
Marion County received funding through the Second Chance Act (SCA) in FY2013 to form the MCRI Co-Occurring Disorders Project—also known as Link Up—which helps men with a medium to high risk of recidivism who are diagnosed with co-occurring mental illnesses and substance use disorders reenter the community successfully and/or stabilize their symptoms while on community supervision. Program participants must be within six months of scheduled release from prison and are connected to health insurance, community-based treatment, job skills/readiness training, emergency assistance, information about affordable housing, peer mentors, and other critical services and organizations following their release. One key piece of the project’s success is the use of peer mentors, who are certified recovery mentors, in providing case management. The peer mentors meet with participants while they are incarcerated and conduct bi-weekly mentoring groups as well as one-on-one support. Peer mentors spend the first day of release with participants to connect them to resources.
When the SCA grant ended, Marion County sustained Link Up with funding from the sheriff’s department, and Bridgeway now operates six programs focused on reentry or diversion, with the help of its partners in the MCRI. These programs were made possible through years of relationship building among these agencies and other collaborators.
MCRI staff use the following instruments to screen and assess program participants:
- The Level of Service/Case Management inventory (LS/CMI), provided by the Department of Corrections and the Sheriff’s Department
- University of Rhode Island Change Inventory (URICA)
- Life Events and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Checklists
- Texas Christian University Drug Screen (TCUDS)
- Texas Christian University Criminal Thinking Scales
- Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9)
- Generalized Anxiety Disorder Assessment (GAD-7)
Lead Case Planners and their partners were asked to provide information about how their programs implement some of the Collaborative Comprehensive Case Plan priorities. See below for more information about the Marion County Reentry Initiative’s efforts.
Interagency Collaboration and Information Sharing
While Marion County had years of relationship-building among their various agencies, the Sheriff’s Department determined that the best way to do this work would be to contract with Bridgeway to take the lead in coordinating case and treatment planning (with the Sheriff’s Department playing an oversight role). As the lead case planner in the MCRI, Bridgeway’s Director of Behavioral Health, Tina Bialas, and her staff spend a significant amount of time coordinating with their partners for the case planning process to make sure that all their activities are aligned in support of participants in their programs.
Another key aspect of what makes MCRI effective is the leadership buy-in from all the partnering agencies. Bridgeway’s CEO Tim Murphy and Commander Jeff Wood of the Marion County Sheriff’s Department collaborated on initiatives before the county received their SCA award, which showed the middle management and program line staff at each agency the value of collaboration and helped build the foundation for the collaboration.
Tip: Clinical agency staff should get to know their partners in the criminal justice system and their roles, and familiarize themselves with the processes at the correctional facility —Matt Meier, sergeant at Marion County Sheriff’s Department
Staff Training
Bridgeway’s corrections treatment team provides behavioral health treatment to participants who are reentering the community or being diverted from corrections institutions. One important component of building the team is staff selection, which begins before job candidates are hired. Through the interview process, Bridgeway staff can gauge a candidate’s interest in working with people who have been involved in the justice system and learn more about a candidate’s corrections experience, such as whether the candidate has worked in a correctional facility or has personal experience with incarceration. More than half the corrections treatment team has lived experience with the corrections system.
Bridgeway also prioritizes training staff from the moment they are hired and is constantly working with the MCRI partners to help provide training so that staff can better incorporate criminogenic and behavioral health needs into participants’ case plans. Some trainings include ways to use the risk-need-responsivity (RNR) model to develop treatment for people convicted of sex offenses; training from the Oregon Department of Corrections on the LSCMI tool and the Women’s Risk and Need Assessment (WRNA); training on the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA); and training on trauma-informed care. In addition, Bridgeway has had its peer mentors trained in Effective Practices in Community Supervision (EPICS)—a model that was developed for community supervision officers—and has cross-trained community supervision agents on behavioral health.
Bridgeway is not the only MCRI partner to develop training protocols to help its staff in case planning, however. The Marion County Sheriff’s Department also trains its officers and other staff on principles around RNR and encourages these staff to attend Bridgeway trainings on behavioral health and other topics.
Screening and Assessment
The MCRI screening and assessment process involves multiple steps. For potential participants who are on community supervision, Bridgeway staff receive copies of the LSCMI assessments from the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. The Oregon Department of Corrections also provides quarterly lists of people incarcerated in their facilities who meet initial qualifiers for the in-reach component of the program. Bridgeway counselors then conduct a biopsychosocial assessment for substance use disorders and mental illnesses and obtain demographic and other background information from potential participants once they can attend clinic-based services. After staff determine that the person meets eligibility criteria for Link Up, they incorporate results from all assessments into the person’s case plan. The LSCMI assessment scores in each domain (specific criminogenic risk factors such as antisocial peers or conflict in family or relationship circumstances) help Bridgeway staff determine which areas to focus on when creating participants’ case plans and the specific criminogenic needs to be targeted in programming.
After Bridgeway staff have developed a participant’s case plan, they coordinate with the participant’s certified recovery mentor and therapist, community supervision agent, sergeants at the Marion County Sheriff’s Department, and Bridgeway supervisors to identify the most appropriate interventions for addressing that person’s criminogenic risk and behavioral health. The corrections treatment team at Bridgeway runs 40 treatment groups per week, utilizing evidence-based treatment materials including Interactive Journaling. This wide selection of groups assures that participants can receive individualized treatment guided by what is clinically indicated in their assessments. Each participant works towards the goals they have outlined with their therapist in their case plans, which include measurable objectives that target criminogenic risk factors as well as common behavioral health concerns.