An Intervention for Community Reentry Informed by Dialectical Behavior Therapy

Mental health services for justice-involved individuals have typically focused on stabilization of those diagnosed with a serious mental disorder or substance use disorder, or in-prison group treatment programming focused on criminogenic needs. These services can be contrasted with individual psychotherapy for persons with no or mild mental disorders, addressing broad-based concerns (both criminogenic and non-criminogenic) to facilitate a successful life in the community following reentry from incarceration. This chapter describes an example of such a service. Specifically, we describe the application of a brief, community-based, and individually tailored intervention informed by principles of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and the Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) model that was designed to help fill this gap in services.