A behavioral health crisis can become a 911 call, which can then become police contact. Police contact can become arrest or, in some cases, death. Arrest can become detention, which interrupts medication, housing, employment, treatment, family connection, social supports, and recovery. When all is said and done, release can return a person to the same conditions that helped create the crisis in the first place.
We often describe behavioral health and the criminal legal system as two separate systems that sometimes intersect. For far too many people like me, they are not separate at all. They are experienced as one continuous revolving door – a hamster wheel if you will!
My work has placed me at this intersection from multiple vantage points—as a peer professional, criminologist, workforce developer, organizational leader, and participant in jail oversight and systems change agent. Those perspectives have taught me something no flowchart can fully capture: when systems collide, people need more than another referral, another assessment, or another case file.
They need a credible human bridge. That bridge now has a name: The Justice Peer.
We Have Mapped the Intercepts. Now We Must Staff the Gaps.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Sequential Intercept Model maps six points at which people with mental health and substance use challenges can be diverted from deeper criminal legal system involvement—from community services and crisis response, through law enforcement, courts and jails, reentry, and community corrections (supervision) (SAMHSA, n.d.). The model uses communities as resource navigators identifying resources and gaps. I believe one of the most important gaps is relational.
A person may meet a crisis worker at Intercept 0, a police officer at Intercept 1, a court clinician at Intercept 2, correctional staff at Intercept 3, a reentry specialist at Intercept 4, and a probation or parole officer at Intercept 5. Each professional may be competent and mean well. Yet the person moving through those systems can still experience isolation, exclusion, fragmentation, distrust, repeated retelling of trauma, and the feeling that decisions are happening around them rather than with them.
Imagine instead that trained Justice Peers were intentionally embedded across those intercepts—not as an “extra service,” but as part of our behavioral health and public-safety strategy – building needed strong, unshakeable infrastructure.
Justice Peers Are Not Simply Peers Who Work in Justice Settings
Peer support is grounded in mutuality, recovery, shared experience, hope, and the belief that people are more than diagnoses or the worst moments of their lives. Justice Peer practice carries those principles into the highly specialized environment of carceral care.
Justice involvement creates its own language, trauma, stigma, barriers, and survival knowledge. Arrest, arraignment, incarceration, court mandates, probation, parole, reentry, collateral consequences, housing exclusions, employment barriers, and family disruption are not abstract concepts to people who have experienced them. Shared experience can create relational credibility—the kind of credibility that cannot be conferred by a job title alone (Hart, 2026; Skipper, H., & Ortiz, J. M., 2024).
A clinician may ask, What treatment might help? A District Attorney may ask, What does the law require? A case manager may ask, What services are available?
A Justice Peer can also ask: How did you get here? What is happening to you right now? What are you afraid of? What do you understand? What do you want to be your next step? And what do you need to make that next step possible?
That does not make the Justice Peer a clinician, attorney, or case manager. It makes the peer something different—and vitally necessary.
From Lived Experience to Lived Expertise
There is a very important distinction between lived experience and lived expertise. Lived experience is what happened to us.
Lived expertise is what we build from what happened to us through reflection, training, education, practice, ethical boundaries, and the ability to translate personal experience into service and systems change.
We should not romanticize lived experience. Experiencing incarceration does not automatically prepare someone to support another person through incarceration, just as receiving therapy does not make someone a therapist. Justice Peer work requires competencies: active listening, trauma-informed practice, behavioral health knowledge, recovery principles, system navigation, advocacy, professional boundaries, crisis awareness, cultural humility, and the ethical use of self.
A 2024 umbrella review encompassing 35 reviews of paid mental-health peer support found that successful implementation is associated with factors including adequate training and supervision, clear roles, supportive workplace culture, leadership, and effective collaboration. The review also identified role ambiguity, inadequate resources, low pay, and negative attitudes from non-peer staff among persistent implementation barriers (Cooper et al., 2024).
Professionalization, however, must not become something that looks like sanitization.
We cannot credential Justice Peers so thoroughly that we erase the authenticity, candor, cultural knowledge, and critical perspective that make their lived expertise valuable in the first place.
Justice Peers Should Exist Before, During, and After Incarceration
The criminal legal system often locates peer support at reentry. Reentry is critical—but it is too late to begin thinking about peers only after incarceration has already occurred.
At Intercept 0, Justice Peers can work alongside community crisis teams, respite programs, outreach teams, shelters, and alternatives designed to resolve crises without arrest. SAMHSA specifically identifies peer-operated crisis response or respite as a strategy at this stage.
At Intercept 1, Justice Peers can strengthen crisis-intervention training, co-response efforts, post-crisis engagement, and diversion. At Intercepts 2 and 3, peers can help people understand what is happening, connect to care, maintain hope, and prepare for transition. At Intercept 4, peers can provide in-reach and reentry support before the gate opens—not merely a folder of brochures at discharge. SAMHSA expressly recognizes peer support as a reentry strategy, including assistance with planning, housing, treatment connections, and identifying triggers or circumstances that could lead to renewed justice involvement.
At Intercept 5, Justice Peers can help people navigate the complicated tension between supervision requirements, treatment, recovery, employment, housing, and family responsibilities (Policy Research Associates, 2020).
The evidence base is growing. A 2025 scoping review identified 49 peer-support programs across 66 studies focused on people with health-related needs returning to communities after incarceration. Shared lived experience, sustained engagement, participant-centered support, and cross-agency collaboration emerged as important implementation factors (Treitler et al., 2025).
But I want us to imagine something larger than reentry. “What if the peer relationship—not just the case file—could travel across the intercepts?”
What Our Work Has Taught Us
At the NYC Justice Peer Initiative, our work developing, training, and supporting Justice Peers has reinforced several lessons.
First, justice-specific training matters. A generic peer credential cannot be expected to cover every complex issue and trajectory created by criminal legal system involvement.
Second, employment matters. We cannot celebrate certification while offering people only temporary, low-wage, or tokenized positions. A workforce is not truly professionalized until there are sustainable jobs, living wages, quality supervision, advancement opportunities, and leadership pathways.
Third, employers need preparation too. Hiring someone with lived experience does not automatically create an environment that values lived expertise. Organizations must examine job descriptions, background-check practices, disclosure expectations, supervision, workplace culture, compensation, and—perhaps most importantly—who is allowed to hold authority.
Finally, Justice Peers should not be limited to helping people survive systems. They should help redesign them.
From Representation to Power
For years, directly impacted communities have rightly insisted: “Nothing about us without us.” That remains essential. But the next stage of this work must go further.
We must move from referral to relationship. From representation to power. From isolated peer programs to peer infrastructure. From lived experience to lived expertise.
Justice Peers should be present in crisis services, hospitals, courts, jails, reentry programs, community supervision, policy offices, research teams, training institutions, and executive leadership. Their expertise should influence and live in budgets, program design, hiring, evaluation, policy, and accountability—not just advisory committees convened after the important decisions have been made.
Too often, people with lived experience are invited to a table built by someone else and told that inclusion has occurred because somebody added a chair.
The next evolution must be different. We are not simply asking for a seat at the table. WE ARE THE TABLE!
The Missing Infrastructure
National data points have long documented disproportionate behavioral health needs among incarcerated populations. In Bureau of Justice Statistics surveys conducted in 2011–2012, approximately one in four people held in local jails met the threshold for serious psychological distress during the previous 30 days, while 44 percent reported previously being told by a mental health professional that they had a mental disorder (Bronson & Berzofsky, 2017). This data is unfortunately dated, but the system questions that are exposed remain urgent, factual, and up to date.
We cannot punish people into wellness. We cannot arrest our way out of unmet behavioral health needs. And we cannot build continuity of care solely through forms, referrals, and institutional handoffs.
The question is not whether people experiencing behavioral health challenges will encounter the justice system. Until we fundamentally change the pathways that lead there, unfortunately most of them will.
The more important question is: Who will be standing beside them when these systems collide? Justice Peers can stand at that intersection—not merely helping people navigate the road but helping us rebuild it.
If behavioral health and justice systems are serious about transformation, lived expertise cannot remain at the margins of either system. It must become part of the infrastructure of both.
Helen “Skip” Skipper, CPS, MA, is Executive Director, NYC Justice Peer Initiative and Vice Chair, NYC Board of Correction. For more information, email [email protected].
References
Bronson, J., & Berzofsky, M. (2017). Indicators of Mental Health Problems Reported by Prisoners and Jail Inmates, 2011–12. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. NCJ 250612.
Cooper, R. E., Saunders, K. R. K., Greenburgh, A., et al. (2024). The effectiveness, implementation, and experiences of peer support approaches for mental health: A systematic umbrella review. BMC Medicine, 22, 72. doi:10.1186/s12916-024-03260-y.
Hart, A. (2026), Empowerment for People With Lived Experience of the Justice System? Peer Leadership and the ‘Spectrum of Public Participation’. Howard J. Crim. Justice., 65: 105-114. https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12615
Policy Research Associates, Inc. (2020). Peer support roles across the Sequential Intercept Model [Tool]. Delmar, NY: Author. https://www.prainc.com/resource-library/
Skipper, H., & Ortiz, J. M. (2024). Conceptualizing Peer Support to Mitigate the Rural-Urban Divide. International Journal of Rural Criminology, 8(4).
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (n.d.). The Sequential Intercept Model (SIM). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Treitler, P., DiGioia-Laird, V., & Long, B. (2025). Peer support services for individuals with health-related needs reentering the community after incarceration: A scoping review of program elements and outcomes. Health & Justice, 13, 51. doi:10.1186/s40352-025-00358-0.
