Building Bridges in New Jersey

Abstract

This article describes the experience and outcomes of the National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded Criminal Justice Drug Abuse Treatment Studies 2 Improving Best Practices in Assessment and Case Planning for Offenders protocol in the state of New Jersey. The protocol was designed to test the effectiveness of an Organizational Process Improvement Intervention in improving four assessment and case planning domains for drug-involved offenders in correctional settings transferring to community treatment based agencies. This article describes the protocol and the change team model process through which correctional and community agency staff collaborated to improve assessment and case planning for offenders with substance abuse problems. The primary goal of these collaborative efforts was to link information across stages of the treatment continuum to improve service coordination. Data taken from qualitative interviews with agency participants are used to illustrate the common themes that emerged relating to the intervention process, barriers to implementing developed goals, and facilitative factors that contributed to successes. The findings from the current study provide indication that organizational process improvement strategies can be implemented within a correctional setting to reduce interorganizational barriers and to facilitate improvements in the continuum of care involved in the treatment of offenders with histories of substance abuse.

Recidivism Treatment for Justice-Involved Veterans: Evaluating Adoption and Sustainment of Moral Reconation Therapy in the US Veterans Health Administration

“…Interviews with VJP specialists regarding their perceptions of the implementation potential of treatments for recidivism in VHA provide some insights by highlighting cross-service (e.g., VJP and behavioral health) and cross-system (e.g., healthcare and criminal justice system) partnerships as potential facilitators to MRT implementation in this noncorrectional setting (Blonigen et al 2018a). The broader literature on implementation of evidence-based practices for justice-involved populations also point to facility characteristics such as appropriate staffing levels (Prendergast et al 2017), collaborations across stakeholders (Abdel-Salam et al 2015;Green et al 2015;Lamberti 2016), communities of practice among practitioners (Pearson et al 2015), and partnerships with treatment courts (Abdel-Salam et al 2015) as positively impacting adoption and sustainment of these practices.…”