Increasing Family Well-Being Supports for Justice-Involved Parents in Texas

Impact Highlight: With GPL support, staff in one Texas county went from never referring justice-involved parents to family-focused services to consistently referring interested parents each month.

Project Context:

• The experience of interacting with the criminal justice system through a citation, arrest, or incarceration can be stressful and destabilizing for anyone, but especially for parents or those with caregiving responsibilities.
• Many of the factors that make families more likely to interact with the criminal justice system may also increase the risk of interacting with the child welfare system. Parental criminal justice system involvement can also create new needs, which may also increase the risk of child welfare involvement.
• In Texas, leaders recognized that existing criminal justice services helped individuals navigate the criminal justice system but often overlooked broader family needs.

How the GPL Supported:

• Texas’ Division of Prevention and Early Intervention (PEI) and the GPL worked together to learn that most families who had a child removed from their care had at least one parent with prior criminal justice system interaction.
  • Despite these earlier interactions, very few criminal justice professionals were connecting parents to state-funded services designed to help families thrive and avoid crises that could lead to child welfare involvement.
• Developed and tested pilot initiatives in eight counties to help PEI learn:
  • When during a family’s interaction with the criminal justice system would a referral to PEI programs be most welcome and impactful? (e.g., pre-trial, during reentry, etc.)
  • Who is best suited to make those referrals?
  • What kinds of tools, resources, training, and support do the referring criminal justice professionals need to effectively identify parents among their clients, match them to best-fit services, and make successful handoffs
• Helped PEI seek out insights from parents impacted by the criminal justice and child welfare systems and then used those insights to guide adjustments to the pilot initiatives.
  • This included interviews with parents to inform pilot design, as well as a 10-month parental workgroup to advise on day-to-day pilot operations. Parents offered insights on tools, strategies, and key decisions to ensure families would feel comfortable accepting and engaging in services.
    • “I liked seeing changes to how things are done based on the opinions we shared in the last session. Thanks for including me and others in the creation, implementation, and heart of this work.”
      – Parent Workgroup Participant
• Coached direct service staff in criminal justice agencies, including a public defender’s office and reentry services organization, on how to more consistently identify parents among their clients and connect them with voluntary local services. This included ideas on how to start conversations with clients about their families’ needs, rather than just focusing on the individual’s criminal case.
• Developed a toolkit, based on pilot learnings for PEI providers who wanted to establish new referring relationships with local criminal justice agencies. The toolkit includes step-by-step instructions for identifying local criminal justice agencies, establishing referring relationships, designing user-informed tools to make referrals easier for staff, and using data to monitor and strengthen referral processes.

Results:

• PEI providers in eight counties built new pathways to receive referrals from local criminal justice agencies. This included public defenders’ offices, jails, probation offices, and nonprofits. These relationships allowed providers to connect previously overlooked, or difficult to identify, populations to family well-being services.
  • Example 1: The Harris County Public Defender’s Office (PDO)’s Holistic Services Division made it easier for staff to identify parents among their clients. They also made referrals for family well-being services part of the Division’s standard offerings by:
    • Asking clients about their caregiving responsibilities. In just over seven months, they identified 105 clients who were also parents .
    • Adding questions about family well-being to their intake and assessment tools.
    • Adding training about family well-being needs and available services to their standard new staff onboarding.
    • Establishing regular meetings between PDO staff and local PEI providers to ensure up-to-date information and strong handoffs.
  • Example 2: After updating their intake and assessment processes, frontline staff at a reentry services nonprofit in Bexar County identified 50% of all new clients as parents, half of whom had current caregiving responsibilities.
    • The nonprofit also collaborated with local PEI providers to strengthen handoffs and referrals to services. This means the nonprofit went from never referring clients to PEI services to consistently referring interested parents each month.