CSG Justice Center Receives Award to Improve Data Collection in Mental Health Courts

The Council of State Governments Justice Center has received a grant from the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati to develop a data entry system that will enable mental health courts to improve their data collection processes.

As communities across the country struggle to keep people with mental illnesses from repeated involvement with the criminal justice system, the number of mental health courts has grown rapidly. Despite their popularity, most of these courts do not have an effective system for amassing and analyzing data on their participants and demonstrating their impact with documented results.

Justice Center staff will create a data entry system that will provide mental health courts with a foundation for collecting consistent data on all of their participants, which can help them to improve their program procedures and assess how their participants are faring. In addition, the data system will also help to facilitate standardized data collection across programs. This will allow the field to understand more clearly the elements of mental health courts that contribute to positive results and thereby improve outcomes for people with mental illnesses involved with the criminal justice system. This project will build on the Justice Center’s work on data collection with the five Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) mental health court learning sites.

With the help of staff from the Ohio Supreme Court, the Justice Center will begin this project by convening a group of Ohio mental health courts in May to develop specifications for the data entry system and discuss the type of information that courts would like to collect and the reports they would like to generate. Once developed, the system will be piloted by the participating courts and then promoted across Ohio and, eventually, nationwide.

For years Ohio has been on the forefront of the mental health court field, and Justice Center staff are grateful to the Health Foundation for the chance to work closely with Ohio programs to develop the data entry system. The Health Foundation has been instrumental in promoting health policy in the state, and this product should help to complement the Foundation’s critical work.

To read more about the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, visit http://www.healthfoundation.org.