SJC Exchange Library

Researchers and practitioners often call jails in the United States "the new asylums" for the rising number of individuals they confine with behavioral health needs and substance use disorders. Some calculations estimate that nearly 20 percent of individuals confined in jails have a severe mental health diagnosis (SMHD) and nearly 65 percent have a substance use disorder (SUD). Deflection allows police discretion to replace arrest with outreach to community-based service providers, eliminating involvement in the criminal legal system altogether. Implementing or expanding these police-led programs is important to both reduce jail populations and helping people get the services they need. 

 
Understanding the effectiveness of these programs and how police make decisions about who and when to deflect is important to these expansion efforts. As a result, JSP teamed with two SJC sites: Pima County, AZ and Charleston County, SC to ask two main questions:

(1) How does deflection to a local crisis center impact future arrest and/or continued access to the crisis center and
(2) How do police make decisions about who and when to deflect individuals to these crisis centers? 

They found individuals often did not experience another arrest after their deflection. And, those who experienced more police contact and deflections, stayed longer in treatment each time they were deflected. The ability to deflect the same individual more than once means police hold an incredible amount of decision-making power for triaging people out of the legal system revolving door and into a treatment system open door.

You can read more about this study and their key findings in their blog, here! 

Throughout the blog, you'll also find links to several key resources unpacking: (1) the difference between deflection and diversion; (2) challenges to treatment initiation and engagement; (3) crisis stabilization units; (4) police as frontline educations of a public health approach. And, our two suggested key principles for future deflection programs (5) deflection first, arrest rare and (6) deflect all, if at all.