Community corrections officials and staff face the difficult challenge of identifying services for individuals who typically have a wide range of needs and few resources, while ensuring that these individuals comply with a complicated array of regulations and prohibitions. Extremely high caseloads per officer compound these challenges. The Consensus Project suggests strategies to ensure the successful integration of released individuals into the community by collaborating with the courts, corrections agencies, and mental health systems to identify individuals with mental illness as early as possible and to ensure access to treatment and other services, and by working with law enforcement and other agencies to monitor individuals and ensure compliance with graduated sanctions, rather than incarceration, whenever possible.

Though the Consensus Project encourages a systemic approach to improving the response to people with mental illness involved in the justice system, we recognize the need for community corrections personnel to focus on the issues that most directly pertain to their roles. To that end, we recommend that they focus on the following sections: