Background & Approach
Doña Ana County’s Competency Diversion Pilot Project supports individuals with frequent contact with the criminal justice system who may have competence and/or mental illness needs. Individuals meet with a forensic navigator for a warm handoff to services (e.g., housing, transportation, medications for opioid use disorder, medical, behavioral health, assisted outpatient treatment) within 72 hours. The detention center’s medication-assisted treatment (MAT) program provides induction, maintenance dosing, withdrawal management, and referral to an MAT provider upon release to the community. The county’s Reach, Intervene, Support, and Engage (RISE) program reduces reincarceration and homelessness by creating jail reentry plans and linking to community-based services.
In 2023, Doña Ana County Health and Human Services equipped cross-agency staff to provide trauma-informed response training, with support from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).They conducted subsequent training with mental health and substance use disorder treatment providers, detention center cadets, crisis triage center personnel, and the fire department crisis response mobile unit team. Doña Ana County has also implemented several collaborative initiatives, including a taskforce to map racial and ethnic inequities and to gather data on justice-involved individuals, New Mexico’s first Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic at Families & Youth Innovations Plus, and the LC3 Behavioral Health Collaborative of over 180 representatives across 70 cross-sector agencies, which works toward building an ideal behavioral health service system.