Changing Lives and Changing Outcomes: "What Works" in an Intervention for Justice-Involved Persons With Mental Illness

Interventions that focus on the psychiatric and criminogenic needs of justice-involved persons withmental illness are rare. A Treatment Manual for Justice Involved Persons with Mental Illness: ChangingLives and Changing Outcomes (CLCO) was developed specifically for meeting these co-occurring needs.Although results from an initial evaluation indicated that CLCO successfully resulted in reducedsymptomatology and some aspects of criminal risk, much additional work examining the effectivenessof CLCO remains to be done. The present evaluation examined the extent to which offenders gainedknowledge (i.e., content retention) throughout the program, the extent to which content retention waspredictive of program completion, and the extent to which treatment engagement (i.e., session attendanceand homework completion) was predictive of program completion. Participants consisted of male andfemale felony offenders in a residential treatment facility (n = 130), and dually diagnosed male offendersin a residential treatment facility (n = 39). Results indicated that participants in this intervention retainedtreatment content, and this content retention was predictive of treatment completion. Implications ofthese findings suggest that CLCO is a promising new intervention for justice-involved persons withmental illness.