Probation and Parole Officers Can't Do It All: Leveraging Community Health Specialists to Provide Wraparound Services

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Kelly Johnson is an adult Parole & Probation Officer with the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice. She is assigned to the Women & Family Services Unit. Kelly works specifically with the Multnomah County Justice Reinvestment Program, which reinvests the costs of incarceration in to community-based programming with customized and intensive wrap-around service plans to individuals who would otherwise face lengthy incarcerations. Through this program, Kelly helped pilot the collaboration between PPO and Community Health Specialist. Kelly also has several years of experience working as a PPO in the Mental Health Unit, serving the clients identified with severe and persistent mental health diagnoses.

Rochelle Reed is an adult Parole & Probation Officer with the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice in Portland, Oregon. She is assigned to the Women & Family Services Unit. Rochelle supervises her clients using gender responsive and trauma informed supervision practices, as well evidence based cognitive-behavioral interventions to promote behavior change. In collaboration with an assigned Community Health Specialist, she helped to pilot wrap around, community health focused services to the clients she serves to help address responsivity factors, increase successful completion rates of supervision, and to decrease recidivism rates. Rochelle is a statewide trainer of the Women’s Risk Needs Assessment (WRNA), is a member of the Oregon Case Management Network, and is a Field Training Officer for the department.

Dr. Emily Salisbury is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Utah Criminal Justice Center at the University of Utah College of Social Work. She is trained as an applied criminologist and focuses her research on the science of correctional treatment interventions, particularly among system-involved women. The Utah Criminal Justice Center is an interdisciplinary research center that provides organizations with research, training, and technical assistance grounded in scientific evidence to prevent and reduce crime and victimization among all communities, with an understanding that approaches must be tailored to the contextual needs of organizations and the diverse populations they serve. As a result of her scholarship on behalf of women, Dr. Salisbury was awarded the Marguerite Q. Warren and Ted B. Palmer Differential Intervention Award from the American Society of Criminology Division on Corrections and Sentencing. Dr. Salisbury is also a co-creator of the Women’s Risk Needs Assessment (WRNA) instruments that were developed through a cooperative agreement with the National Institute of Corrections. The WRNA correctional assessments are specifically designed to focus on the risk and needs of system-involved women, and have been implemented in multiple international and domestic jurisdictions.