Courthouses serve as the center of many government, legal, and community activities, but they can also be vulnerable to threats of violence for all who use them. Join us to learn effective strategies and best practices to enhance courthouse security and prevent violence. Gather tools and resources from current security experts for court security planning committees, victim/witness safety considerations, community, and media collaboration, and security recommendations. Gain understanding of behaviors associated with mental health disorders and workplace violence and how they impact courthouse safety.

Work together in teams to review, evaluate, and develop a comprehensive security plan along with an implementation timeline. Explore effective strategies to strengthen your courthouse security and maintain a safe and secure environment for the public, employees, and officials.

Practice skills to effectively resolve disturbances that may arise in community supervision, during home visits or search and seizure, or in a court setting. Review the Disturbance Resolution model, a framework for determining what level of force is necessary and reasonable in various situations. Explore the legal justification for using force as well as situational desirability, threat assessment opportunities, officer versus subject factors and effective communication techniques.

Explore techniques to recognize drug influence when conducting home visits, search and seizure, or during other interactions with probationers. Develop the critical skills to recognize common paraphernalia and the signs and symptoms of persons under the influence of stimulants, hallucinogens, opiates, marijuana, alcohol, depressants, inhalants, and dissociative anesthetics through hands-on instruction.

Explore the eight principles of effective offender intervention and identify how they impact your department/agency. Develop a departmental vision and mission statement to support evidence-based practices (EBP). Develop goals, objectives, and action steps for organizational change and development of EBP. Establish measures for evaluation of program and individual success.

Explore promising practices in supervising drug/alcohol-involved probationers/parolees in a community-based setting. Examine the importance of utilizing Risk-Need-Responsivity principles, community-based sentencing options, effective case planning and graduated responses to increase public safety and long-term behavior change. Discuss how stakeholders can contribute to improve outcomes for this population.

Discuss the pervasiveness of mental illness in the criminal justice system. Identify basic mental, sociological and educational characteristics of the mentally ill offender population. Explore strategies to address mental health and addiction concerns in crisis and non-crisis situations. Examine the complexity of co-occurring disorders and the interventions that are most effective. Gather tools to implement an action plan that addresses suicidal thoughts or behaviors, self-injury, reaction to trauma, overdose or withdrawal symptoms and others.

Identify the obstacles justice teams have in effectively implementing community corrections programs. Explore and practice problem-solving methods. Develop an action plan to address the identified barriers to program success.

Promote healing, enhance public safety, and reduce recidivism in your role as a tribal community corrections professional. During this training, you will explore strengths-based supervision strategies and case management skills for the following populations on probation: probationers with mental illness, alcohol and substance abuse addiction, and domestic violence offenses. Engage in a variety of activities to enhance your ability to effectively case manage high risk populations. Examine strategies for multi-disciplinary team building to support tribal community corrections.

Learn and practice QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer), an evidence-based life-saving technique developed by Paul Quinnett, to utilize with people in crisis.   Examine suicide myths and facts, warning signs, and the impact of historical and intergenerational trauma on suicide in Native American/Alaska Native communities. Examine significant risk factors and learn how to reduce the risk of suicide among probationers by eliminating any one element of the deadly triad - alcohol, firearms and distress.