title: Screening offenders with histories of mental illness and violence for supportive housing.
abstract: This article describes a community mental health agency's process of screening supportive housing applicants with histories of violent felonies and serious mental illness. The agency adopted its corporate intranet as a tool so that geographically dispersed senior staff could participate in information gathering in order to ensure expert input in admissions decisions. This broad-based participation was designed to maintain community safety, while making the agency's residential resources available to people with mental illness and criminal histories. Considering the high recidivism rate of ex-offenders with mental illness and lack of clearly established best practices to serve them in the community, the authors believe that it is timely for housing providers to reevaluate how to better serve these individuals.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Community Living, Inc., 40 Rector Street, New York, NY 10006, USA.
authors.forename: Peter C
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Campanelli
authors.forename: Elizabeth N
authors.initials: EN
authors.lastname: Cleek
authors.forename: Paul B
authors.initials: PB
authors.lastname: Gold
authors.forename: Harvey J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Lieberman
authors.forename: Aman
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nakagawa
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Skoraszewski
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D003153:Community Health Services; D003625:Data Collection; D004608:Eligibility Determination; D005260:Female; D006208:Halfway Houses; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008403:Mass Screening; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D008875:Middle Aged; D009519:New York City; D010414:Pennsylvania; D012016:Reference Values; D012449:Safety; D014754:Violence