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The resources below are available to help your prosecutor’s office learn more about behavioral health conditions and how to foster equitable connections to community-based care.
Key resources
Understanding and Managing Risks for People with Behavioral Needs: FAQs for Local Prosecutors
This brief provides research about people with behavioral health needs and the stigmas they face. It also presents practical steps prosecutors can implement to improve the outcomes for this population, reduce risk, and maintain public safety.
Prosecutor-Led Diversion Toolkit
This toolkit contains multiple resources to help prosecutors develop their own diversion programs, and it can be used to help other criminal justice stakeholders better understand prosecutor-led diversion and why it matters.
Mapping Prosecutor-Led Diversion
This website is the first-of-its-kind catalogue and interactive map of prosecutor-led diversion programs around the country.
Additional Resources
CSG Justice Center
Publications
- Addressing Misconceptions about Mental Health and Violence: This brief explains common misconceptions about people with mental illness and their risk factors for violence and offers ways that criminal justice professionals can help mitigate such risks.
- Behavioral Health Diversion Interventions: Moving from Individual Programs to a Systems-Wide Strategy: This policy brief describes key components to developing a systems-wide diversion strategy and focuses on the fundamental agencies within the criminal justice system that can lead the implementation of diversion interventions, with the goal of diverting people with mental illness from the justice system and into community-based treatment and support services.
- FAQ: A Look into Court-Based Behavioral Health Diversion Interventions: This fact sheet is a complement to Behavioral Health Diversion Interventions: Moving from Individual Programs to a Systems-Wide Strategy (see above). It provides answers to some common questions about court-based diversion.
- A Guide to the Role of Crime Victims in Mental Health Courts: This guide details how the nontraditional operations of mental health courts contribute to limited victims’ rights policies and recommends practical solutions to improving them.
- Improving Case Processing and Outcomes for People with Behavioral Health Needs: This brief presents opportunities to improve caseflow management and outcomes for criminal court defendants who have behavioral health needs.
- Improving Responses to People with Mental Illnesses at the Pretrial Stage: Essential Elements: This report introduces essential elements for responding to people with mental illnesses at the pretrial state, including decisions about pretrial release and diversion.
- Just and Well: Rethinking How States Approach Competency to Stand Trial: This report outlines the 10 most effective strategies state officials can pursue to improve the competency to stand trial process. Its recommendations represent a consensus view of what the competency to stand trial process should ideally look like.
- Responding to People Who Have Been Victimized by Individuals with Mental Illnesses: This report outlines steps policymakers, advocates, mental health professionals, and others can take to understand and protect the rights and safety of victims of crimes committed by individuals found “not guilty by reason of insanity” or otherwise court-ordered to receive treatment in a mental health facility.
- Screening and Assessment in Jails and Using Data to Improve Behavioral Health Diversion Programs: These manuals can help users develop, organize, and centralize their jail screening and assessment processes in one document, consider where changes need to be made, and develop next steps for improving the screening and assessment processes.
Webinar Recordings
- Advancing Prosecutor-Led Behavioral Health Diversion: This webinar describes some of the unique benefits of and challenges to developing specialized prosecutor-led diversion programs.
- Building Partnerships Between Prosecutors and Mental Health Clinicians: This virtual discussion is intended for jurisdictions and counties interested in creating partnerships between mental health professionals and prosecutor offices.
- Engaging Prosecutors in Sustainable Diversion Efforts: This virtual roundtable provides participants with basic strategies to initiate collaboration with prosecutors and highlights prosecutor-led programs that are being implemented in diverse jurisdictions across the country.
- Right Person, Right Time, Right Response: Diversion in Practice: In this fieldwide virtual discussion, experts from Policy Research Associates and the CSG Justice Center share resources and facilitate a discussion to identify strategies and best practices—with and without law enforcement—for early responses at intercepts 0 and 1.
- Turning One-Off Programs into Systems Wide Behavioral Health Diversion: This webinar describes key components to developing a systems-wide diversion strategy. It focuses on the fundamental agencies within the criminal justice system that can lead the implementation of diversion interventions, with the goal of diverting people with behavioral health needs from the justice system and into community-based treatment and support services
- Using Data in Prosecutor-Led Behavioral Health Diversion: This webinar focuses on the importance of data when working with prosecutors on diversion programs.
Association of Prosecuting Attorneys
- Community Engagement Initiative: This initiative promotes a long-term, proactive partnership among prosecutor offices, law enforcement, the community, and partners within the criminal justice system, and seeks to strengthen prosecutor-led programming and trust building in order to enhance the quality of life of the communities in which they serve.
- Prosecutor-Led Diversion Training and Technical Assistance Sites: The four Prosecutor-Led Diversion Training and Technical Assistance Sites can be used as resources to understand how other prosecutor offices around the country have developed, implemented, and evaluated their proposed prosecutor-led diversion programs.
National District Attorneys Association
- NDAA Fact Sheet: This fact sheet provides information about NDAA’s membership, program overview, and government affairs work.
- Technical Assistance Request Program: Prosecutors and allied professionals can receive technical assistance and resources through NDAA.
- Wellbeing Task Force Resources Overview: This resource overview provides information about NDAA’s Wellness Task Force for prosecutors as a way to encourage them to build personal resilience, engage in self-care strategies, and address potential secondary trauma stress.
Other Resources
- American Bar Association Criminal Justice Standards on Diversion: These standards provide guidance on the development, implementation, and evaluation of diversion programs.
- National Center for State Courts’ National Judicial Task Force to Examine State Courts’ Response to Mental Illness: This website features tools, resources, and best practices to improving court case processing for people with mental health needs.
- Prosecutorial Procedural Justice: A Literature Review: This report summarizes the procedural justice framework as it applies to prosecutors.