Adherence to Evidence-Based Practice in Community Based Treatment as part of Utah's JRI

Study Dates: August 2021

Building an evidence-based criminal justice system requires an ongoingcommitment from stakeholders to continually make improvements and promote collaborative work. Through the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), first passed in 2015,the state of Utah joined 25 other states in implementing strategies to reduce recidivism (Welsh-Loveman & Harvell, 2018). With the passage of JRI, Utah committed to a wide range of priorities, encompassing criminal justice stakeholders across the state, designed to reduce recidivism. As part of those efforts, the Utah Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health (DSAMH) has worked to improve public safety by increasing treatment providers’ capacity to adhere to evidence‐based principles in the treatment of individuals involved in the criminal justice system. To this end, stakeholders identified thirteen substance use treatment providers throughout the state to participate in program evaluation with the Utah Criminal Justice Center (UCJC) at the University of Utah. The majority of these sites, designated as the Local Substance Abuse Authority 1 (LSAA) for their counties, had been previously evaluated with the CPC as part of the Drug Offender Reform Act (DORA) between 2015-2017 (see Seawright et al., 2017 for the DORA aggregate report). This final aggregate report provides a snapshot of providers’ progress with respect to implementing evidence-based practice( EBP) for adult justice-involved clients mandated to substance use treatment. Demonstrated strengths as well as recommendations for program and system-level changes are provided.

Read the reports associated with this study:

Adherence to Evidence-Based Practice in Community-Based Treatment as part of Utah’s JRI

 

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