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Workshop to ID justice system gaps
YOUNGSTOWN
Key community leaders will gather here this week for a workshop designed to ensure that people with behavioral-health disorders who become involved with the criminal-justice system are properly identified and treated.
The workshop is targeted at identifying and addressing gaps in screening and services; preventing people from falling through the cracks in the justice, mental-health and recovery systems; facilitating inmates’ successful return to the community from jail or prison; and reducing the likelihood of their returning to jail or prison.
Beginning at 8:30 a.m. and running all day Thursday, and resuming for a half-day at 8:30 a.m. Friday, the workshop will take place in the Mahoning County Children Services Board building, 222 W. Federal St., where county mental-health and recovery board offices are located.
The list of invited attendees is a Who’s Who of local judges, police chiefs, clergy, prosecutors, and jail, community corrections, mental health and recovery, social service agency and public health leaders.
To help identify the gaps, people who have been treated for mental illness and experienced the criminal justice system also will attend.
“Sometimes, it’s hard to identify people, or people get arrested for a crime, and maybe they’re not identified on their way into the jail,” as having a behavioral-health disorder, said Brenda Heidinger, associate director of the county mental health and recovery board.
Deputy sheriffs are asking more questions of jail inmates than in the past, she said.
“They’re also training their officers who work in the jail to recognize some of the signs and symptoms” of mental illness among inmates, she said.
This enables them to recognize mentally troubled inmates who haven’t self-identified as mentally ill and didn’t identify themselves during a booking interview as feeling like hurting themselves or others, she explained.
“This will not just look at booking. This will look from arrest all the way through the system at the jail and through the court system,” Heidinger said.
There’s recently been a coordinated effort to identify and treat mentally ill people in jail and link them to community services so that when they leave jail, they already have an appointment at a community mental-health center and have any medications they may need, she added.
“Mahoning County has had a long history of working well with all the systems, but this will pull it all together and give us a road map on exactly how the system works,” Duane Piccirilli, executive director of the mental health and recovery board, said of the workshop.
The session is being presented by the Ohio Criminal Justice Coordinating Center of Excellence based at the Northeast Ohio Medical University in Rootstown.
The workshop, which has no registration fee, is limited to 40 people; and 27 are committed to attend so far.
Facilitators will be Daniel Peterca, recently retired pretrial services and special projects manager for the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court probation department; Doug Powley, retired longtime Akron city prosecutor, who helped found drug, domestic-violence, mental-health and DUI specialty courts; and Ruth H. Simera, program administrator of the Roots- town center.
The facilitators have been trained by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to lead these workshops.