What is the Reentry Council? This post has a quick overview at the top. In a nutshell, the Champaign County Reentry Council connects people reentering the community from the criminal justice system to the services and support structures they need to succeed individually. That success also translates to less recidivism in the community and better support for families to be safe and successful as well.
Today's meeting followed up on a lot of the topics from the April Meeting (minutes here). Bruce Barnard was facilitating the meeting. Celeste Blodgett was attending in her new role as Office Support Supervisor for Rosecrance and thanked everyone for their appreciation sent at the last meeting.
Claudia Lennhoff from Champaign County Health Care Consumers discussed the 2018 CCHCC Annual Awards presentation. They will be making a presentation to the Urbana City Council in further recognition of crisis intervention trained officers:
She also highlighted the issues with the Medicaid transition to Medicaid Managed Care. The roll out has left many people auto-enrolled in plan that won't work for them and they are only given one opportunity to change them. She asked that providers and organizations that come across clients with these problems send them to CCHCC so they can help them get on the best plan for their needs.
He also talked about a program providing training for inmates at the Champaign County Jail. Our Jail had been the first to open their doors to the program. There was some discussion about presentations on the program for the local Drug Court as well as through CCHCC. I will update with more specifics as I find out more.
In the report on the Jail, there was talk about the limited facility space (and a bit of a flooding calamity for the new staff who managed to make it work in spite of the issue). They said they're seeing all sorts of, what sounded like, positive results, with the additional staff. There was a discussion with the facilitator and CCHCC's Lenhoff about the seriousness of the facility space limitations limiting the ability to deliver services.
In what will certainly raise skepticism among local jail expansion proponents, Lenhoff explained that she believes there is confusion between previous jail expansion plans and the current ones. Previous plans were derided as wanting more cells with less concern on why they should be filled. She explained current expansion ideas are geared towards space to provide services, not in place of services before reaching jail, but to ensure that those who are in that situation have all the necessary service options. "There should be no wrong door" for people to seek services. She explained that sometimes incarceration is the point where services are needed and wanted most.
The jail's numbers when it comes to screening for services were reported as positive. The screenings help determine need and eligibility for inmates so they can get connected to them.
The Crisis Intervention Team Steering Committee was said to have made at least some data collection uniform across the county, which could be very positive for data collection results. I'm not sure if this data would be necessarily related to or helpful to other efforts of data collection locally for criminal justice, but it certainly sounds like an interesting development. For more information on the CIT team and how it operates, check out their webpage on the Urbana website.
There was some discussion about the Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Program grant money recently released and what sounded like a reference to the proposed coordinating council from the Racial Justice Task Force overarching recommendations:
The Mental Health Board representative noted that the matching funds from their County body would require more detailed information to get moving through the board procedures. Rosecrance's representative offered to help get the information organized and get those details to them by the end of the week.
Mr. Barnard then went over the "Stepping Up" brochure excerpt describing some of Champaign's efforts on mental health and criminal justice collaboration (click to enlarge):
More information on the Stepping Up Initiative and it's goal to reduce the number of mentally ill in our jails at their website. The group is also suggesting a "Day of Action" on or around May 16th to have events informing the public of affiliated programs and opportunities. The Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Program public presentation at the Champaign Public Library and material from the "Innovator County" recognition press release materials were considered as starting points towards a press conference coordinated with local press. Rosecrance volunteered to help lead in coordinating those efforts.
There was a quick overview of recent letters of support for HACC applying for a reentry housing pilot program, as well as a TASC reentry program. The TASC program focused on women from Decatur corrections to Parole District 3.
They offered me a chance to ask questions, but I hadn't caught up enough to know what to ask yet. I did however offer, since our goal is to inform the public on how their local government works, to do what I can to spread the word and let people know what's happening with all of this. So a full write-up tonight and more updates to follow!
Amazingly they adjourned at 12:39pm. Seemed like we covered a lot in 39 minutes. Maybe it just seemed faster after the data and statistics presentation at the HACC meeting yesterday? Could be.
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