Technical Assistance for DOJ Grantees Addressing Substance Use
Highlights
- People with substance use disorder achieve better outcomes when community-based supports are available.
- Abt builds community-based grantees’ capacity to use and share data and evaluate their efforts.
- Abt provides training and technical assistance to grantees and will share findings with the field.
People with a substance use disorder are overrepresented in the justice system, from the arrest phase to incarceration to the risk for recidivism. For example, more than 10 times as many people in prison (58 percent) and sentenced to jail (63 percent) meet substance use disorder criteria, compared with the general population (5 percent). Overdoses are the leading cause of death for formerly incarcerated people, with the immediate reentry period being a particularly vulnerable time for fatal substance use.
To address this group’s unique needs and build on existing resources, communities across the U.S. are seeking and implementing innovative multi-sector approaches that can effectively address the deep-rooted challenges and reentry hurdles these individuals and their families face.
To help, the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) established the Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant, and Substance Use Program (COSSUP). COSSUP assists more than 500 state, local, and Native American tribal grantees who identify, respond to, treat, and support those impacted by illicit opioids, stimulants, and other drugs. With an emphasis on partnership and collaboration across the public health, behavioral health, and public safety sectors, COSSUP grantees implement coordinated community-based approaches and are tasked with collecting, using, and understanding the data from their programs and services.
In partnership with Altarum, Abt provides training and technical assistance to develop, implement, or refine COSSUP grantees’ data visualization activities, evaluation approaches, performance measure reporting, and information sharing with other grantees and the broader criminal justice field.
Abt provides direct support to state and local COSSUP grantees, which includes assessing grantees’ existing needs and strengths to engage with data and evaluation activities; assigning coaching teams to grantees requesting support based on needs and strengths; convening Learning Collaboratives for grantees and an advisory panel to provide diverse perspectives and insights from people with lived experience; developing and delivering webinars, podcasts, and additional resources for grantees; and evaluating the direct support being provided.
Over the two-year project, the team anticipates further contributions to the evidence base of what works in integrated behavioral health and criminal justice programming to reduce adverse outcomes from harmful substance use. We hope to build a cohort of grantees that will be leaders in this space and can effectively use and share data, make data-based programmatic improvements, and partner effectively with evaluators. As the project continues, the Abt team will present at national conferences with other training and technical assistance providers and grantees to share best practices and innovations to help support comprehensive, collaborative initiatives.
