San Joaquin County Probation Department with Assisting Reentry for Co-Occurring Adults through Collective Support
San Joaquin County, California
Last Updated 2018
NOTABLE FEATURES
- The San Joaquin County Probation Department in Stockton, California received Second Chance Act (SCA) Reentry Program for Adults with Co-occurring Substance Use and Mental Disorders grants in Fiscal Years 2011, 2013, and 2015
- Jurisdiction geography: Urban; 685,306 residents
- Size of correctional facilities and populations incarcerated: 1,431 men and women
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
The San Joaquin County Probation Department is the lead case planner for the reentry initiative, Assisting Reentry for Co-Occurring Adults through Collective Support (ARCCS), which includes the probation department, San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office, San Joaquin Behavioral Health Services (BHS), and San Joaquin County Data Co-Op, the program evaluation partner. The target population for ARCCS is medium- to high-risk adult men and women who have co-occurring substance use and mental disorders. Participants serve a minimum 90-day sentence and are on probation upon release from custody. A licensed clinician conducts behavioral health assessments, facilitates Seeking Safety recovery groups (a trauma-oriented intervention), and conducts motivational interviewing, an intervention used to encourage participants’ pro-social behaviors and foster engagement in the program. The ARCCS probation officer develops reentry plans before participants are released, in coordination with the participant and his or her family, clinician, and case manager. Post-release, participants receive additional cognitive behavioral interventions and mental health and substance use disorder counseling.
ARCCS staff use the following instruments to screen and assess program participants:
- Static Risk and Offender Needs Guide (STRONG)
- Addiction Severity Index
- A biopsychosocial assessment for mental illness and other responsivity factors
- Texas Christian University Trauma and PTSD Screen (TCU TRMAForm)
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 efforts in San Joaquin County, CA.
Interagency Collaboration and Information Sharing
San Joaquin County Probation Department’s efforts in interagency collaboration started when the department developed and implemented a program called the Transition-Age Youth Grounds for Recovery (TYGR), with the help of two SCA awards. Probation department leadership recognized they needed to better understand the needs of the target population for the program before they could identify the appropriate collaborative partners, so they asked the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office to gather relevant information on the behavioral health needs of young adults ages 18-24 in the county jail. The Sheriff’s Office collected information on bookings and average length of stay at San Joaquin County Jail as well as the number of suicide attempts among young adults and the number of young adults who required psychiatric medications in the jail. With this new data, probation department officials had a clearer understanding of the needs of young adults in the jail who have co-occurring substance use and mental disorders, and they decided to continue their partnership with the Sheriff’s Office and to partner with BHS to build the TYGR program.
Once TYGR was implemented, staff at the probation department and the Sheriff’s Office analyzed recidivism data for this population along with qualitative data they received from jail staff who worked with the program. While TYGYR showed promising results for young adults, these staff members recognized there was no standardized set of reentry practices for the adult population at the jail. To fill this void, probation department leadership partnered with the same agencies who worked with them to successfully develop TYGR and established the ARCCS program with funding from their 2015 SCA grant.
Probation department leadership also established information-sharing protocols for ARCCS early in the development of the program. Based on these protocols, program participants sign a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) release form to allow limited information sharing among the partner agencies mostly related to program attendance and participation in mandatory groups. For example, if the supervising probation officer asks a participant about a specific diagnosis or about medication that may show up on a drug screen, that information is shared only between the participant and the officer, not between the officer and the clinician. This type of information is typically shared with both the clinician and supervising officer by the participant when a rapport is established.
Tip: Paul Arong, assistant deputy chief probation officer, recommends that lead case planner agency officials take the time to learn more about potential partnering agencies before they start identifying collaborative partners. Sometimes you can have preconceptions of what other agencies can accomplish, but it is necessary to take the time to get to know the partnering agency staff and learn their roles and what they can offer as a partner to your agency. This will help set realistic expectations among the case management team about what each partner involved in the program can do to assist participants through their recovery and reentry, says Arong.
Staff Training
All ARCCS staff have received training in behavioral health, motivational interviewing, cognitive-behavioral interventions, and trauma-informed care. Probation department staff are trained on topics such as aggression replacement training, Effective Practices in Community Supervision (EPICS), and Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training. Additionally, the probation department has a continuous quality improvement (CQI) committee which ensures that staff receive adequate training and are implementing practices with fidelity. The department has also partnered with a community-based support services organization that helps probation officers with their facilitation techniques with participants by providing feedback and coaching to probation officers. Corrections staff who work with ARCCS participants are trained in administering the Kessler Screening Scale for Psychological Distress and in Seeking Safety. Staff at BHS who work with ARCCS participants are trained in evidence-based practices for the treatment of substance use and mental disorders and receive CIT training. The ARCCS leadership team also hosts a bi-annual conference for staff at the partnering agencies and focuses specific sessions on behavioral health topics.
Screening and Assessment
The case plan process for the ARCCS programs starts when Miguel Avila, senior deputy probation officer, conducts an assessment for criminogenic risk and needs using the STRONG instrument (see above). The STRONG instrument identifies the top three criminogenic needs of each participant to focus on in the case plan. Next, Juan Garcia (the BHS clinician), conducts assessments for substance use disorders and mental illness using the Addiction Severity Index and a biopsychosocial assessment. Garcia also uses the TCU TRMAForm to identify symptoms of trauma among clients. Garcia then creates a treatment plan for each participant based on the results of the assessments, and he and Avila do a side-by-side comparison of the participant’s case and treatment plans to integrate them and agree on the appropriate services for the participant. Both Avila and Garcia then meet with the participant to learn his or her goals and obtain input and buy-in from the participant on the case plan. To address the quickly changing needs of participants as they transition from incarceration to post-release programming, ARCCS staff continuously modify participants’ case plans with updated assessment information and each participant’s goals.