ABSTRACT
The last two decades have witnessed a number of important advances in forensic mental health. In this chapter, we summarize three of the most important of these advances in the community: (1) the Sequential Intercept Model (SIM) (Munetz & Griffin, 2006), a conceptual framework for describing how people with mental illness become involved with the criminal justice systemand how they may be diverted from standard avenues of criminal prosecution; (2) specialized police response to individuals with behavioral health problems, with the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) the most widely recognized of such approaches; and (3) problem-solving courts, beginning in 1989 with a single drug court and growing into an array of courts to which justice-involved individuals with particular problems (ranging from substance abuse to mental health to veterans’ issues) can be diverted as an alternative to criminal prosecution, with this diversion including treatment for such problems. We offer an overview and describe the history and research support for each of these advances, followed by consideration of the implications of each for practice and policy.
