Business View Magazine | July 2019

310 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JULY 2019 communities to house many of our inmates. “In 2017, the Board of Commissioners , having had several failures going to the voters, as recently as 2015, heard from the community that the County has never taken a systematic approach to the criminal justice system, just focusing on the corrections aspect. Before the community would get on board to spend money, they really wanted the County to take a more systematic approach to looking at the criminal justice system as a whole, so the County decided to take that feedback and launch a criminal justice system assessment. “We hired CGL, a national firm that works in the criminal justice arena, primarily focusing on facilities that are needed to support criminal justice system - jails, work release centers, courthouses, etc. We also hired a project manager. We didn’t have the internal capacity to lead this ourselves, hence CGL, but just as important, if not more so, we brought in , as the project manager, an organization called Greater Oregon Behavioral Health, that specializes in behavioral health and justice integration. They worked very closely with CGL, helping us walk through this criminal justice system assessment. “We took a view of what’s going on relative to pretrial services, how are we managing a population in the jail, what we’re doing to try and prevent folks from having to go to jail, and looking at the behavioral health aspect impacting our criminal justice system. We stepped back and went through about a year-and-a-half process. We just concluded Phase One and now we’re beginning to embark on Phase Two. The ultimate outcome of the assessment was a report issued this January that identifies three different scenarios