Useful management tool for understanding correctional mental health services.

              A Useful Management Tool for Understanding Correctional Mental Health
Services
by
Robert J. Powitzky, Ph.D.
Corrections has a new challenge. With a proud history of facing formidable challenges such as prison gangs, irrational psychopathic violence, prison litigation, and ever-changing sentencing guidelines, corrections has evolved into a proud profession with the development of sophisticated management tools including management strategies for prison gangs, effective supermax technology/procedures, professional accreditation standards, quantitative custody/security classification systems, and unit-management theory.
The new challenge facing corrections today that will require that same professional ingenuity is the recent phenomenon of a dramatic increase of those persons in correctional care and custody who have some form of mental illness. This phenomenon is a widely accepted fact by professionals working in jails, courts, community corrections, probation, parole, and prisons (Sigurdson, 2000, and Pinta, 2000). However, a void continues to exist for a common sense, useful management tool ­a framework -for adequately defining the problems and for engineering solutions related to the management and treatment of persons with mental illness in the correctional setting. Correctional administrators need to know how to efficiently manage their scarce resources in a manner that meets constitutional requirements. Legislators need useful information to make critical decisions for allocating those scarce tax dollars and for development of necessary oversight guidelines. Consumers and advocacy groups need to understand the nature of the problems and what is being done to address those problems. Researchers and academicians need comparable data to formulate and analyze hypotheses.
The purpose of this article is to present such a management tool to address those needs.
We still do not ask useful questions!
Legislators, advocacy groups, fiscal analysts, mental health professionals, and others frequently ask questions about mental health issues that correctional administrators find very difficult -if not impossible - to answer. The reason for the difficulty is the questions are not useful questions. One needs to know how to ask useful questions in order to get useful information. The following are three of the most common examples of frequently asked, non-useful questions:
1. “How many offenders have a serious mental illness?” OR “What is the prevalence of serious mental illness in your correctional population?”
These seemingly straightforward questions ignore the fact that there is no widely accepted operational definition of “serious mental illness.” Prevalence studies have included a wide range of definitions from a) those persons with a history of mental health treatment, to b) only those diagnosed with certain mental illnesses, to c) all mental disorders found in Axis I of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV-Revised (DSM-IVR) (Ditton, 1999; Fasel and
Copyright 2002