The amount of time between the Initial Opt-In Hearing and the Formal Opt-In Hearing averaged 74 days. While there are no hard and fast rules governing how long this process should take, the study found that that "the ACRP is performing rather well on the front-end of the admissions process (up to the initial opt-in stage) but that more could be done to work on the back end (time between the Initial Opt-In Hearing and the Formal Opt-In Hearing)."
Status Hearings
The study found that the incentives and sanctions used by ACRP judges to promote compliance at status hearings, though standardized, were not tailored to correspond to participant progress.
Also, the sanctions appeared to be somewhat arbitrary, depending on the judges' personality a times. The study stated that "Although difficult to quantify, anecdotally, one appeared more reserved whereas the other seemed more charismatic; one tended to be more punitive, the other a little more assertive."
Cross-Systems Integration
The goal of any mental health court is move along a continuum from basic implementation (requiring judicial leadership) to integration (forging partnerships) with the criminal justice, behavioral health and service delivery systems, and finally to institutionalization (interwoven into the fabric of a community).
The study found that, long this continuum, the ACRP is not quite there yet but it has come a long way since its inception. It has made significant strides in forging partnerships and building relationships with a vast array of key stakeholders in the Anchorage community who have an important impact on the program as well as the people it serves.
Analysis
Critique
Qualitative data, such as interviews with participants, is highly valuable in obtaining data for Quality of Life outcomes. Quality of Life is highly subjective and hard to measure. The most common, and perhaps reasonable, method is to ask the subject about its Quality of Life.
Although in most cases, the only way to determine Quality of Life outcomes is to ask the subject itself, the nature of the subject matter with mental health patients presents certain difficulties. There is always some risk of unreliability with data gained from self-reporting. Here, those risks are exacerbated. First, mental health patients are more likely than the average person to misperceive his or her own mental states, emotions, or condition. Second, these mental health patients are or were at risk of re-institutionalization if their progress does not meet treatment program standards. Thus, they might have misrepresented their progress and general Quality of Life as more positive than it actually was.
Although interviews with stakeholders do not reveal much about the two major outcomes, Quality of Life and Criminal Recidivism, but were valuable for determining overall program health. The participants have expertise in the field and incentive to providing helpful information. Thus, the participant's responses were effective for determining overall institutional health and for obtaining suggestions and recommendations for improvement.
The data gained from interviews with stakeholders about their opinions about the effectiveness of the program could be vulnerable to self-interest. Because the existence and operation of the ACRP has a huge effect on their own work, the participants might skew their responses in order to promote change that would help the participants or their agency. For example, a participant from an agency receiving the outflow from ACRP might claim that the ACRP needs to prepare better documentation in order to reduce workload from the participant's own agency.
Qualitative data, such as...
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