Collaboration Between Universities and Public Behavioral Health Organizations

This book’s major purpose is to offer detailed information about successful collaborations between universities and public behavioral health organizations in criminal justice contexts. This final chapter distills the descriptions of collaborative projects offered in the previous nine contributed chapters into a series of “lessons learned” toward building, operating, and sustaining a successful collaboration. The lessons are offered in particular areas: planning, working together, training, consultation, financial considerations, personnel, and research. This volume, including the nine specific exemplary projects and the final “lessons learned” chapter, has implications for comparable collaborations between universities and public behavioral health organizations in a criminal justice context.

Ohio’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Center of Excellence

This chapter describes the development and operation of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Center of Excellence (CCoE), a collaboration between the Northeast Ohio Medical University and the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. It provides an example of the “Center of Excellence” concept, involving the delivery of designated services to key players in the criminal justice system. The Ohio CCoE used the Sequential Intercept Model as a basis for prioritizing services such as training to police (e.g., CIT) and systems mapping workshops, and it employed the larger partnership to pursue additional funding through foundation and government grants. The broad focus of the collaboration has been on systems-level interventions. It offers a model for this approach to collaborative partnership.

University–Public Behavioral Health Collaboration

This chapter describes a partnership between faculty at the Florida Mental Health Institute, University of South Florida, and various public agencies. It is a broad and wide-ranging collaboration, including areas such as civil commitment (providing a reporting center), Medicaid drug therapy management for behavioral health, and problem-solving courts. Advantages to these multiple partnerships have included the more extensive provision of research and evaluation services and the partnership with public agencies as part of application for extramural funding in the form of grants and contracts. These partnerships illustrate the scope of the projects that can be developed through successful collaboration.

Using an Academic–Practice Partnership to Develop and Implement an Empirically Informed Approach to Juvenile Probation Case Management in Philadelphia

This is a more recent collaboration between applied researchers at Drexel University and multiple public-sector partners (the Juvenile Probation Department, Department of Human Services, offices of the district attorney and public defender, Police Department) involved with juvenile probation services in the City of Philadelphia. The collaboration focuses on the implementation of graduated response as a case management approach with those on juvenile probation, and it provides coordination, training, and research and evaluation services toward this implementation. This is a particularly important example of a partnership with multiple stakeholders, focusing on an innovation in the delivery of community-based services to youth on probation. This kind of work will assume increasing importance as our society moves toward a greater focus on services in the community for justice-involved youth.

Establishing a Forensic Training Clinic

The collaboration described in this chapter differs somewhat from that in other chapters. A university in Texas—Sam Houston State University—established a forensic training clinic staffed by doctoral trainees in clinical psychology and supervised by faculty members. This clinic offered services to courts in the region, primarily involving the evaluation of individuals involved in the criminal justice system on issues such as competence to stand trial, sentencing for individuals committing sexual offenses, mental state at the time of the offense, and others. This yielded valuable specialized training opportunities for graduate students, strong evaluations at a reasonable rate for courts, and an opportunity to generate funding for the university and the training program. The “collaboration,” therefore, was between the university and the court system rather than a state department of mental health; however many of the developmental and operational considerations were comparable to those described in other chapters.

The Designated Forensic Professional Program in Massachusetts

The Designated Forensic Professional Program in Massachusetts, a collaboration between the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, was started in 1985 for the purpose of providing specialty training and certification to mental health professionals providing public-sector evaluations of competence to stand trial and criminal responsibility to the Massachusetts courts. The program initially certified only psychologists but was eventually expanded to include forensic psychiatrists as well. The approach involves intensive mentoring and supervision and serves as a national model for states wishing to train public sector mental health professionals in the delivery of specialized forensic evaluations.

University of California Davis Forensic Psychiatry and California Department of State Hospitals Collaboration

The collaboration described in this chapter involves the Department of Psychiatry in the medical school at the University of California, Davis, and the California Department of State Hospitals. For more than 20 years, this partnership has involved placing forensic psychiatry fellows in state hospitals operated by the state of California. In addition to the high-quality forensic psychiatric services delivered by these fellows, the partnership has also included consultation and on-site forensic evaluations conducted by supervising faculty, continuing education and training provided to hospital staff, and applied research conducted on questions directly relevant to practice. It serves as a national model for a well-operated, long-standing partnership between academic psychiatry and a publicly operated hospital system.

The Development of the Center for Forensic Behavioral Science

This chapter describes a large collaborative project based in Melbourne, Australia, between a public agency providing forensic and correctional mental health services and a research and training center at Swinburne University of Technology. There are several aspects of this partnership that make it distinctive. First, the size of the initiative and the number of individuals working on it is striking. Second, the collaboration has grown very substantially but also evolved through various changes in partners, thus illustrating the importance of flexibility and adaptiveness. Third, it is the only example of a collaborative project of the kind discussed in this volume that is based outside of the United States. It clearly illustrates the value that can be provided through such a partnership, and has important implications for similar partnerships on a large scale.

Successful Development of Threat Assessment and Management Programming Within a Midwestern University

In the partnership described in this chapter, the university faculty who were interested in threat assessment and management developed a service within the university to operate such a program. In this respect, rather than a partnership between a university and an external agency, this chapter describes a partnership between different divisions (including security) within a university. The programmatic service addressed the ongoing need in any large university for the evaluation of (and sometimes interventions with) members of the university community who may present a threat of harm to others. In addition to providing threat assessment services, the partnership had a strong research component: a 10-year evaluation of services and outcomes provides some of the best empirical information available about this kind of work.

Introduction

This book’s major purpose is to offer detailed information about successful collaborations between universities and public behavioral health organizations in criminal justice contexts. This introductory chapter briefly describes the nine contributed chapters in this volume, each illustrating a particular collaboration. Each contributed chapter describes the collaboration in more detail, including purposes, beginning, leadership, who is served, services, operations, effectiveness measurement, financial arrangements, and lessons learned. This first chapter also defines relevant terms and reviews the literature relevant to this area. The particular focus is on collaborations that are relatively long-standing and successful, with the goal of aggregating the various aspects of the different projects into a larger model for success.