Intensive Session: How to Build and Sustain Specialized Mental Health Caseloads: Nuts and Bolts Guidance from NC and GA Community Supervision Agencies

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As the Specialized Mental Health Supervision (SMHS) Program Manager for the Georgia Department of Community Supervision, Kasey helps oversee SMHS through training, policy, and network development and manages a Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Program grant for DCS focused on Enhancing Specialized Mental Health Supervision with a Clinical Case Consultation Model. Kasey has served the State of Georgia since 2013 and has worked at the Department of Community Supervision since its inception in 2015. Kasey has served as a Community Supervision Officer supervising High Risk, Mental Health, and Sex Offender caseloads and as an Assistant Chief in the Coweta Judicial Circuit. Kasey also implemented the grant-funded Day Reporting Center program in the Coweta Circuit, served as the Security Threat Group (STG) Coordinator, and was the Master Trainer in the Enhanced Supervision Program (ESP), developing curriculum and policy, and training all DCS certified officers, community coordinators, peer coaches, and adjunct trainers in ESP skills. Kasey has a Bachelor’s Degrees in Psychology and Sociology and a Master’s Degree in Education. She is a Senior Instructor and Firearms Instructor with the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council (POST) and a member of the Georgia Professional Association of Community Supervision (GPACS).

Sonya Brown is the Social Work Program Administrator in Division of Community Supervision in the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction and has over 20 years of experience with programs and services for justice-involved people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders. Ms. Brown has been an integral member of the implementation team for specialty mental health probation in North Carolina since its inception in 2014. She has fostered collaboration with academic partners to advance the research on mental health probation and leads the department’s efforts to disseminate the model across the state’s 100 counties. Prior to becoming an administrator with the Division of Community Supervision, Ms. Brown was the Justice Systems Innovations Section Chief with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services and a former probation and parole officer in NC.

Dr. Tonya Van Deinse is a research associate professor in the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Van Deinse and her lab – Health Interventions in the Legal System (HILS Lab) – focus on intervention design, implementation, and evaluation at the interface of behavioral health and legal systems. Dr. Van Deinse started her work in mental health 20 years ago in residential treatment with adults with severe mental illnesses and then later worked in mental health at the systems level (i.e., managed care organization) where she began to focus on people with severe mental illnesses in the criminal legal system. Dr. Van Deinse is the principal investigator and implementation science researcher on a number of research studies and program evaluations. Examples of studies in the legal system include: (1) developing and testing tailored implementation strategies to improve collaboration and coordinator between mental health probation officers and community resource providers, (2) testing clinical case consultation and network building effort to improve implementation of specialized mental health supervision, (3) evaluating an expansion model of a county’s mental health court. Dr. Van Deinse has her BA in Public Policy and Master’s and PhD in Social Work.