Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health

Diversion: alternatives to prison

People can be diverted at ANY stage of their route through the criminal justice system.

Diversion is the process to ensure that people with mental health problems who enter (or are at risk of entering) the criminal justice system are identified and provided with appropriate mental health services, treatment and any other support they need.

All-Stages Diversion:
an interactive model

Using evidence and learning from our work on diversion we have produced the All-Stages Diversion model. It shows the criminal justice pathway and highlights who should be involved, how diversion is achieved and what the outcomes are for each step on the pathway.

We have developed an interactive model which looks at how adults can be diverted.

Launch interactive all-stages model
(requires Flash)

The PDF below features diversion for adults and young people.

Download the All-Stages Diversion model (154 KB)

Bradley Review

In December 2007, Lord Bradley was asked to carry out a review of how more offenders with severe mental health problems can be diverted away from prison and into more appropriate facilities.

The report makes numerous recommendations for improvements in the way people with mental health problems and people with learning disabilities are managed in the criminal justice system. They include a call for Criminal Justice Mental Health teams to divert people in police stations as well as the courts.

We were involved with the Working Group for this review and submitted evidence based on our research projects. We also published a briefing paper on the report and the government's response (see right).

The review fed into the Improving health, supporting justice: the national delivery plan of the Health and Criminal Justice Programme Board. You can read our response to the delivery plan here.

Community sentences and the Mental Health Treatment Requirement

The Mental Health Treatment Requirement (MHTR) is one of 12 possible requirements for all people given a community sentence in England and Wales. It is rarely used in practice, even though more than two-fifths of people on community sentences have mental health problems.

We carried out some research to understand how the MHTR works in practice and the factors that facilitate/prevent the issue of the requirement. The study explored how the offender is managed post-sentence, what treatments are available and the effectiveness of the MHTR in improving offender's mental health and reducing re-offending.

The study was conducted in London in four phases, at the court level, probation, healthcare services and finally with offenders currently on a MHTR.

The results were published in A Missed Opportunity? which finds that the purpose of the MHTR and the group of people to whom it can be given are not clear to sentencers, probation staff or health professionals. It calls on the Government to issue clear guidance on the use of the MHTR.

Diversion

Diversion finds that court diversion and liaison schemes in England only work with one in five of the people with mental health problems who go through the criminal justice system. Many opportunities for diversion are being missed and too little is being done to ensure that offenders with mental health problems make continuing use of community mental health services.

But in the absence of a clear national policy framework, diversion services have developed in a piecemeal and haphazard way. Many schemes are insecurely funded and there is an unacceptably wide degree of variation in their ways of working.

The report looks at the evidence on outcomes and the effectiveness of diversion, it includes information from site visits and looks at whether diversion is good value for money.

International evidence

Some of the research that went into the report came from international evidence that we gathered at a video conference. World-renowned experts from seven countries discussed issues such as getting support for diversion, the cost benefits, local initiatives, what people might be diverted into and multi-agency working. A summary of the conference is available to download below.

Download Video Conference Summary (44 KB)