A policy win is a major step, but how do you make it work on the ground? Our Community Justice team has grappled firsthand with that question in Los Angeles, where they’ve helped transform what the legal system looks like for people with mental illness.
We’ve heard the story before. Advocates work tirelessly to build public support and get a new policy passed into law. Then, after the thrill of victory, the critical question floats to the surface: how is it actually going to work?
Our new guide on policy implementation offers concrete advice to reformers grappling with that question. It draws on the experiences of advocates and activists who have faced firsthand the challenges of implementing reform – including our Community Justice team, which has helped transform how Los Angeles’s legal system responds to people with mental health needs.
The stakes are high: Los Angeles’s jail system holds so many people with mental illness that it’s considered the biggest mental health facility in the country. But far from offering people the help they need, jails often do more harm to those struggling with mental health.
Our team’s work in LA began after California passed a law in 2018 making it easier for people to get treatment, instead of punishment, when a mental illness contributed to their arrest. The reform gave judges more authority to grant community-based services to people coming into court, even over a prosecutor’s objections. The law had the potential to connect more people with meaningful support, instead of saddling them with jail and criminal records. But to do that, it would need to be implemented well.
The law had passed, and many people were excited about the promise of it. But some were also discouraged because they couldn’t see how it would happen.
As is often the case, making the law work on the ground was more of a challenge than it looked on paper. For starters, many courts in LA had no framework for linking people to treatment in a coordinated way—the way they would have to in order to prevent so many people with mental health needs from cycling in and out of jail.
“The law had passed, and many people were excited about the promise of it,” recalls Chidinma Ume, senior director of the Community Justice team. “But some were also discouraged because they couldn’t see how it would happen.”
With a grant from the Safety and Justice Challenge to help implement LA’s reform, our team set about working to fill in the gaps of the legislation. To build a court program that could help people access treatment and keep them from jail, the first step was to embed clinical staff right in the courtroom—staff who could make an immediate assessment of people’s needs and connect them to community-based services.
This new model for the court was informed by the Center for Justice Innovation’s long experience building similar programs in New York and New Jersey. “What we bring to the table is that we’ve done this before,” Ume says. “Our national experience gave us the ability to say to the courts, ‘Here’s how you can do this effectively.’”
We speak a lot of different languages to help with the process of collaboration. And that goes a long way when it comes to implementation.
Even with a blueprint, though, real challenges remain. Transforming courts into places where people can find meaningful support means securing the buy-in of many, sometimes skeptical, players: judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, sheriffs, and service providers. In the criminal legal system, where different roles have often been defined in an adversarial way, collaboration isn’t always second nature.
To make this new pathway to services work, our Community Justice team had to get these different groups talking to each other. “We knocked on every door in the county,” says Ume. The team also had to translate between different priorities: the rights of people who have been accused, the needs of victims, the clinical duties of service providers, and the broader community. “We speak a lot of different languages to help with the process of collaboration. And that goes a long way when it comes to implementation.”
With the Community Justice team’s help spurring that collaboration, the reform culminated in LA County’s Rapid Diversion Program, which has now connected hundreds of Angelenos to much-needed care in their communities. To date, more than 670 people have graduated from the program to have their criminal cases dismissed. The vast majority of them have had no further contact with the system.
Our new guide on implementation concludes with a simple, vital principle: “Design and implement your policies with those you’re trying to reach foremost in mind.” As our Community Justice team delves into the nitty-gritty work of implementation, they push that mission back to the center of every conversation.
What are the unmet needs that keep people cycling through our systems? How do we build new structures to meet those needs within the system while also leading people out of it? And how do we ensure those structures are working equitably, instead of reproducing the racial disparities that run throughout the legal system as a whole? Making policies work for the people they’re meant to reach means tackling those questions deliberately and collaboratively.
A policy win is a crucial step in the right direction. But when it comes to reforms that aim to meet vital needs and address deeply rooted inequities, there are no quick fixes. Change comes from a sustained effort to push our systems beyond their comfort zone in service of a common goal: getting people the help they need, in the way they need it.