Introduction to the Special Issue on Diversion From Standard Prosecution

Over the past two decades, there has been a paradigm shift in how the criminal justice system handles specific types of offenders. The initial impetus for this shift was the long-overdue recognition that standard criminal justice processing was not resulting in meaningful reductions in drug use and criminal recidivism among drug-involved offenders. As a result, courts across the United States began developing specialized dockets designed to address the specific criminogenic risk factors of drug-involved offenders. The advent of drug treatment courts was the beginning of a new generation of specialty courts and other community-based efforts to deal with specific types of offenders. Although these efforts began with a focus on drug-involved offenders, community-based alternatives to standard prosecution were soon developed for other subsets of offenders, including those with mental health problems.

Drug courts and mental health courts have received a good deal of attention, but specialty courts are only one type of community-based diversion program. Indeed, there are a range of community-based alternatives to standard prosecution that span the entire criminal justice continuum. In this regard, the Sequential Intercept Model developed by Munetz and Griffin (2006) provides a useful organizing framework. This model describes five points at which standard criminal justice processing can be interrupted (or intercepted) and individuals can be diverted from standard prosecution: (1) law enforcement and emergency services; (2) post-arrest: initial detention/hearing and pre-trial services; (3) post-initial hearings: jails/prisons, courts, forensic evaluations, and commitments; (4) re-entry from jails, prisons, and forensic hospitalization; and (5) community corrections and community support. Each of these intercepts provides an opportunity to intervene with offenders and potentially break the costly and ineffective cycle of arrest, incarceration, release, and re-arrest that has often characterized the criminal justice system’s response to certain types of offenders.

This special issue presents the most up-to-date research on diversion from standard prosecution, and we are fortunate to have received many high-quality manuscripts that address various points along the Sequential Intercept Model and various subsets of criminal offenders. The issue begins with an article by Heilbrun and colleagues that provides an overview of the Sequential Intercept Model and a review of the available empirical evidence for community-based alternatives at each intercept for justice-involved individuals with severe mental illness. Next is an article by Redlich, Liu, Steadman, Callahan, and Robbins that examines the length of time from initial arrest to enrollment into mental health court and compares it with time from arrest to disposition for offenders with and without mental illness traditionally processed. The article by Hughes, Steadman, Case, Griffin, and Leff provides a simulation model that projects the fiscal impact of jail diversion programs using data from actual criminal justice and mental health systems and the best outcome data from the literature.

The article by Colwell, Villarreal, and Espinosa describes the evaluation of a pre-adjudication diversion initiative for juvenile-justice-involved youth with mental health needs in Texas. Christy, Clark, Frei, and Rynearson-Moody focus on six challenges of diverting veterans from the criminal justice system and into appropriate trauma-informed mental health and substance abuse services at Intercept 2 of the Sequential Intercept Model. The next article, by Barber-Rioja, Dewey, Kopelovich, and Kucharski, considers the utility of the Historical, Clinical, Risk Management-20 (HCR-20) and Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV) in predicting diversion non-compliance and re-incarceration. Butler, Goodman-Delahunty, and Lulham examine whether diversion to a pretrial community-based program reduces sexual recidivism in adult intrafamilial child sex offenders.

The study by Marlowe and colleagues calculates the incremental efficacy of periodically adjusting the schedule of status hearings and clinical case-management sessions in response to drug court participants’ performance in the drug court program. Held, Brown, Frost, Hickey, and Buck describe the potential benefits and challenges of providing integrated health services during transition planning and return to the community among jail releasees with mental health problems, using the results from a pilot program in Texas. The article by Titcomb, Goodman-Delahunty, and Waubert de Puiseau examines whether intrafamilial sex offenders and extrafamilial pedophiles benefitted equally from diversion into a community-based treatment program. Finally, Fiduccia and Rogers describe the effects of a final-stage diversion program for offenders on the brink of probation revocation.

We thank all of these authors for contributing their work to this special issue and for their patience during the publication process. We were fortunate to recruit leading authorities to serve as reviewers for the manuscripts we received, and we thank the reviewers for their insightful and timely comments. Finally, we thank Curt Bartol for giving us the opportunity to edit this special issue, and we thank Anne Bartol and Gina Cook for their assistance throughout the publication process.

We view the articles in this special issue as representing the most up-to-date research on alternatives to standard prosecution, and we believe that researchers, clinicians, and policy-makers will find the information herein to be valuable in their respective roles. Moreover, as community-based alternatives to standard prosecution continue to grow, it will be essential that decisions regarding the planning and implementation of these programs be informed by empirical evidence. As such, we hope that the collection of articles in this special issue can serve to guide the expansion of a research agenda for investigators in this area.