In 2015, the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office started a program at the county jail, dubbed Reach Out, aimed at tack- ling recidivism among inmates.
By screening inmates for mental health issues and connecting them to support providers like Spectrum, MATForce and Angie’s House, the goal was to allow offenders to put their lives back together after leaving the jail, hopefully leading to a reduction in repeat offenses.
In March of 2018, the jail started keeping track of detailed statistics about the inmates involved in the program, in the hopes of better understanding the needs and issues of those who pass through the jail, as well as to evaluate the efficacy of the program.
The jail partnered with Dr. Ricky Camplain and Dr. George Pro at the Center for Health Equity Research at Northern Arizona University in order to study the data, assess the successes or failures of Reach Out, and to identify what issues inmates face in order to improve the program.
This week, the NAU researchers released preliminary data on Reach Out’s effectiveness, measuring from March 19, 2018 through March 19, 2019.
The early results suggest that Reach Out has been working in the way that jail administrators hoped it would.
Inmates who participated in Reach Out showed a 16% recidivism rate, a significant drop from the 28% average in the Arizona Department of Corrections, according to a 2004 study by Pew Charitable Trusts.
The study also showed notable drops in the number of people incarcerated by the jail and how long they stayed, some of which is attributable to pre-arrest diversions by community partners including the Spectrum Mobile Crisis Response Team, the West Yavapai Guidance Clinic Crisis Stabilization Unit, and the Terros Mobile Crisis Response Team. The data showed that from 2017 to 2018, bookings dropped from 9,324 to 8,467, the average daily population dropped from 562 to 512, and the total number of inmate days in the jail dropped from 200,190 to 186,360.
“It’s exactly what we were hoping for,” said YCSO Chief Deputy David Rhodes, who oversees jail operations. “It’s what we believed would happen. Anecdotally, when you look at what the system was before, when there were no pre-arrest diversion options, and there were no coordinated releases out of the jail, we could easily see that if those processes got put in place, really there should be drops.
“There should be drops in bookings. There should be drops in jail days, there should be drops in jail population, there should be drops in recidivism.
“It was pretty basic. And so we put those things in place, and of course we have that.”
The preliminary data from the researchers is only the beginning of a much larger study of the program by NAU, which aims to look not just at whether Reach Out is having its intended effect, but to look in detail at the mental health issues of the jail inmates and examine whether the program is addressing their needs.
The fact-sheet provided from NAU showed that of those screened for services by the jail, 46% had moderate or high risk of mental health diagnoses, 39% had moderate or high risk of substance abuse, and 40% had moderate or high risk of an adverse childhood experience.
“I’m very happy that it shows the recidivism rates [declining],” said Beya Thayer, executive director of Yavapai Justice and Mental Health Coalition and a key part of the Reach Out program. “But to me I’m more interested of course in the risk factors [of] people who are involved in the justice system — what those risk factors are — because that helps with the programmatic areas.”
“The broad kind of thing that we’re looking at is recidivism for the jail, and looking at the characteristics of people who go through the Reach Out program and looking at the likelihood of a possibility of recidivism based on these characteristics,” Prosaid. “What different combinations of characteristics from inmates predispose them to recidivism, or on the other hand, what characteristics are protected against recidivism?”
Reach Out is the first program of its kind addressing a county jail — which means it focuses on shorter stays and pretrial detention, not extended sentences like a state or federal prison — in Arizona, and has gotten recent support statewide. The program is partially funded by a May 2018 funding bill proposed by Arizona Sen. Sylvia Allen [R-District 6], which provides $500,000 for the program over three years. Rhodes said that he has been invited to speak on criminal justice throughout Arizona, and sees a potential for recreating the program’s efforts in other counties.
“To our knowledge this is the first jail in Arizona to push forward a program like this,” Camplain said. “I commend the sheriff’s office and the Reach Out program for taking the initiative to try to solve these problems in a very systematic way.
“Around the country there are other programs — not exactly the Reach Out program, and definitely not evaluated like they’re asking the Reach Out program to be, so they’re being very open and honest about their results and what they’re finding.
“You don’t typically see that in a research setting a lot from programs developed by correctional facilities.
“So that’s definitely, from our point of view, very novel and exciting. There’s not a lot out there, and they’re definitely paving the way in Arizona I think.”
