Collecting Accurate and Timely Data on People with Mental Illnesses in Your Jail
More than 400 counties have joined Stepping Up: A National Initiative to Reduce the Number of People with Mental Illnesses in Jails. Building on the success counties have seen as part of their local efforts, Stepping Up is expanding its work to provide counties with the tools they need to systematically identify people with mental illnesses who enter local jails. Consistently and accurately identifying people with mental illnesses will result in better connections to treatment in jail and in the community, and collecting and tracking data on these individuals is essential to understanding the extent of the challenges locally, setting goals for improvement and measuring progress. Having this data at the beginning of a planning process helps counties target scarce resources and develop an action plan that will create a system-wide impact. In this workshop, hear about the tools and resources Stepping Up is developing to tackle this important part of counties’ efforts and hear from counties that have already made progress in this area.
