Traumatic Brain Injury in Criminal Justice
About the Project
Inmates living with traumatic brain injury (TBI) are an understudied, vulnerable population, and are overrepresented in correctional facilities. TBI has been linked to poor impulse control, aggressive behaviors, deficits in attention span, and higher risks for substance use disorders. Symptoms often negatively impact behavior within corrections and contribute to increased recidivism rates. The prevalence of TBI within corrections is very high; although rates vary among sites, our pilot data from the Denver County Jail Mental Health Transition Unit suggests that up to 96% of those inmates have a history of at least one complicated TBI.
Recognizing the scope of this problem, we developed a novel partnership with the State of Colorado. The overarching goals of that collaboration are to increase identification of brain injury in youth and adults involved with corrections through the development, implementation, and evaluation of a comprehensive and effective screening/identification and assessment protocol; to provide the professionals with the training and tools needed to successfully support these individuals; and to develop a seamless referral protocol to ensure that, once identified with brain injury, individuals and their families will receive information, resources, and resource facilitation support to increase access to rehabilitation and other services necessary to be successful outside of the corrections settings. The proposed research agenda includes a plan to manually code the data generated by the screening tools (brain injury and neuropsychological screening results) into the REDCap database for the purposes of program development and evaluation as well as the identification of population-based trends in vulnerability prevalence (traumatic brain injury [TBI] history, mental illness, substance abuse, cognitive deficits). These data are being used to determine the population prevalence of vulnerabilities including traumatic brain injury (TBI) history, mental illness, substance abuse, and cognitive deficits among Colorado offenders. Results will be used to determine the need for and, ultimately, the relative efficacy of interventions including self-empowerment training, correctional staff education, and expanded community re-entry resources (e.g., resource facilitation support).
GSPP is working with 28 justice sites from jails to specialty courts and Division of Youth Corrections with plans to expand throughout the Department of Corrections as well. We are in year 4 of a 4-year contract with the Colorado Brain Injury Program which secured grant funding from the Colorado Office of Behavioral Health (OBH) and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA; CFDA # 93.234 and #NCRW1410033OBH respectively).
Our primary goals are to screen for identification of individuals with TBI, build a trained TBI workforce (including mental health and neuropsychological assessment service delivery), provide information about TBI to families and make referrals to appropriate service providers, and facilitate access to needed services. Secondarily, we are able to embed unique service learning opportunities into psychology graduate training at GSPP and have also created more than 30 field placement and work-study positions for students.
