Long Beach was just awarded a combined $9.5 million in grants to expand programs that help people with mental health and substance problems and divert people from the criminal justice system.
In a news release Friday, the city’s Department of Health and Human Services said it was given $8 million by the California Board of State and Community Corrections. Another $1.5 million from the U.S. Department of Justice went to the Long Beach City Prosecutor’s office and Police Department.
The $8 million in state funding will be used to create a Long Beach Re-entry Service and Diversion Program. This will connect community nonprofits to nonviolent former convicts dealing with poor mental health or addiction.
People in the program can be offered things like therapy, employment assistance, legal support and drug treatment. Specific programs will also be tailored toward women and youth ages 15 to 24.
This should translate into lower rates of recidivism, said Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, while addressing “gaps for re-entry services” in a humane manner.
More information about the program will be released in early 2025, the department said.
The federal grant, meanwhile, will go mostly toward LEAD, a pre-booking diversion program the city expanded in April 2022. It was previously used in the city’s northside neighborhoods from 2017 to 2020 and diverted 300 people from incarceration — most of whom stayed out of jail, according to evaluators at Cal State Long Beach.
“This is a big win for Long Beach,” said City Prosecutor Doug Haubert, who manages the LEAD program.
Congressman Robert Garcia, D-Long Beach, said the money will specifically be used to create a Mobile Care Coordination team that responds to overdoses and open drug abuse.
“Literally, it’s going to save lives,” Garcia said. “This is the team that’s going to go out and actually ensure that people that are overdosing have a chance to survive from that overdose. I think that’s going to (have) a huge impact on their families and on the community.”
Some money will also go toward purchasing more body cameras to be worn by police officers and databases to store footage.
Garcia previously secured $350,000 for the LEAD program through the DOJ to update the “Guides” App, which streamlines correspondence between law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and psychiatric experts.
Diversion programs exist to pull qualifying people from a criminal justice system that would further their mental deterioration. About 45% of inmates in the Los Angeles County jail system experience mental health problems, up from 27% in 2017. Most would be eligible for a diversion program if it were made available.
Funding may not last for long, however. The state grant comes from Proposition 47, which is set for rollbacks after voters last week overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36, a tough-on-crime ballot initiative that will enact harsher penalties for repeat offenders of retail theft, property crimes and drug offenses.
Proposition 36 reverses some parts of Proposition 47, a landmark 2014 law that reduced the California prison population by downgrading nonviolent thefts and drug possession to misdemeanors. It also saved money — $816 million over the last decade — that the state has largely dolled out in grants.
With Proposition 36 potentially sending thousands more people into the prison system, that funding could dry up for existing rehabilitation programs like LEAD. In their report, the Legislative Analyst’s Office expects the measure will cost 10s of millions or over 100 million dollars annually.
Inversely, Haubert has previously said that since Proposition 47 passed, there has been a sharp decline in drug court participation, as offenders are quickly released and see little reason to enter a program.
The measure, he said, will help curb the rise in property crimes statewide while steering more people toward diversion programs, many of which did not exist when Proposition 47 was first enshrined into law.
“These things didn’t exist 10 years ago,” Haubert previously told the Long Beach Post.
When asked about the new state law, Garcia said “we need to do everything that we can to steer towards diversion programs, to steer towards helping people in the field.”
“It’s all part of the public safety picture,” he added. “So as the state kind of moves to make its changes and reform the kind of Prop 47 and move forward on new diversions, this adds to that support.”