Florida Partners in Crisis

Diversion Programs

The GAINS Center estimates approximately 800,000 persons with serious mental illness are admitted annually to U.S. jails. Moreover, among these admissions, the preponderance (72 percent) also meet criteria for co-occurring substance use disorders. As community-based mental health services have failed to keep pace with, law enforcement departments and jails have become de facto service providers to persons with co-occurring disorders.

Over the past two decades, jail diversion programs have emerged as a viable and humane solution to the criminalization and inappropriate criminal detention of individuals with mental disorders. Diverting appropriate individuals from jail to community-based mental health treatment has been heralded for its potential benefits to the criminal justice system, the community and the diverted individual.

The term "jail diversion" refers to programs that divert individuals with serious mental illness (and often co-occurring substance use disorders) away from jail and provide linkages to community-based treatment and support services. The individual thus avoids arrest or spends a significantly reduced time period in jail and/or lockups on the current charge or on violations of probation resulting from previous charges.

Key jail diversion program activities include (Steadman, et al, 1995; Steadman, et al, 2001):

1. Defining a target group for diversion,
2. Identifying individuals as early as possible in their processing by the justice system,
3. Negotiating community-based treatment alternatives to incarceration, and
4. Implementing linkages to comprehensive systems of care and appropriate community supervision consistent with the disposition of the criminal justice contact.

While all diversion programs engage in some form of identification and linkage, there is no definitive model for organizing a jail diversion program. Different jail diversion strategies are needed because local criminal justice systems vary so much in size, structural characteristics, levels of perceived need, resources available within the communities' mental health and substance abuse services network, and local politics and economics (Morris and Steadman, 1994).

Source: The National GAINS Center

The Florida Mental Health Institute at the University of South Florida will be creating a database that will catalogue various diversion programs operating in the different counties in Florida. Once this is completed a link to that website will be posted.

The Council of State Government Justice Center has developed a national database cataloguing several communities throughout the nation who have various police based, jail based, court based and re-entry based programs addressing the needs of people with serious mental illnesses and substance use disorders who come in contact with the criminal justice system. Go to www.cjmh-infonet.org for more information.

For more information about Pre-booking, the CIT model, Post-booking and Re-Entry click on the links to the left under Diversion Programs.