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From Juvenile Hall to Clinical Care: De-Escalating Youth Trauma Through Deflection Pathways
This article examines how youth deflection differs from traditional diversion, and how behavioral health leaders are using deflection programs to de-escalate trauma and keep adolescents out of the justice system. Communities increasingly seek preventive alternatives to juvenile detention. Seven...
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Nobody Listened Until She Was in a Courtroom: Postpartum Illness and a Diagnosis That Runs Out
Dana came onto our unit nineteen weeks after she delivered her son. Her husband got up at two that morning and found her side of the bed empty. She was in the baby's room, sitting straight up in the rocking chair, not rocking, looking at the wall. She did not lift her head when he came in, or when...
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Beyond Deinstitutionalization: Unraveling the Complex Criminalization of Serious Mental Illness in America
Individuals with Serious Mental Illness (SMI) are disproportionately represented among the populations of the nation's correctional facilities. Some have dubbed jails and prisons the "New Asylums" as the criminal justice system has become the de facto service provider for individuals with severe...
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Still Arresting Our Way Out: Why New York Needs to Expand Its Diversion Courts
For decades, New Yorkers dealing with mental health and substance use issues have been funneled into our jails and prisons and denied the treatment they need to get better. Far too often, local correctional facilities end up serving as the default mental health provider. New York is not alone in...
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Beyond Punishment: Rethinking Behavioral Health Care in the Justice System
Correctional facilities in the United States have increasingly become major providers of mental health care (Cherson, 2025). One in every two to three people incarcerated in U.S. prisons is estimated to live with a mental illness, far higher than the general population (Dumont et al., 2012)....
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Beyond the Offence: Trauma, Borderline Personality Traits, and Female Offending
Women involved in the criminal justice system often present with complex and overlapping psychological, social, and developmental needs. Histories of childhood adversity and victimization are common in justice-involved populations, and research has linked cumulative adverse childhood experiences...
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The Hidden Face of Methamphetamine Addiction: Why We Need to Talk About America’s Silent Crisis
Methamphetamine addiction doesn’t discriminate. It reaches into suburban homes and rural communities with equal devastation, yet it remains one of the least understood and most stigmatized forms of substance use disorder in America today. While opioids have dominated national headlines and...
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Westchester County Develops “Lives Forward” Program – Providing Dual Certification MH and Addiction Peer Training to Currently Justice Involved Individuals
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Few things illustrate this better than using one’s lived experience to support another person seeking recovery from co-occurring disorders. Now formally recognized as “peer”...
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Addressing Nonparticipation in Treatment Courts: The 5 As Framework
Treatment courts face persistent challenges with participants failing to fully engage in treatment or dropping out altogether. Because engagement and retention are critical to public safety and outcomes, treatment courts must understand why nonparticipation occurs and how to respond when it does....
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The Mental Health Association of Westchester’s Intensive and Sustained Engagement Team (INSET)
Anyone involved in the mental health system, whether an individual diagnosed with a behavioral health condition, family member, or practitioner of services, knows that there is pervasive stigma in our country concerning mental health. Although the COVID pandemic has brought increased attention to...
