A Community Approach to Working with Justice Involved Women

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4:15 PM - 5:45 PM

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With women's incarceration rates on the rise in Oregon, along with an increasing number of revocations for this population, Multnomah County decided to take action. We began by investigating several different approaches to working with women that could potentially lower rates of both incarceration and revocation. As an agency, we decided that the most promising approach for our population would be to add Community Health Specialists--specialists who are tasked with engaging more intensively with women under supervision to promote their success and produce lower incarceration rates. In this session we will discuss these steps we took to proactively address women’s incarceration rates. We will explain how we set up the Community Health Specialist positions and how we integrated them into the overall supervision of the women on caseloads. We will also explore how having Community Health Specialists who conduct client outreach are affecting case planning.