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PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Nadia Chait, Senior Director of Policy & Advocacy at CASES
5:17:06
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124 sec
Nadia Chait from CASES testified in support of alternative to incarceration (ATI) programs, highlighting their effectiveness in serving individuals with mental health challenges and improving community safety. She shared a success story of a client named Alfred and urged the council to restore and increase funding for ATI and reentry programs.
- CASES served over 1,800 people last year through ATI programs
- Chait emphasized that providers like CASES are better equipped than DOC and DOP to handle mental health challenges
- The testimony included a specific funding request: restore $3.8 million for ATIs, $8 million for reentry, and add $2.4 million in discretionary dollars for ATI programs
Nadia Chait
5:17:06
Good afternoon, I'm Nadia Chait, the senior director of policy and advocacy at Cases, and we are proud to be a member of the ATI Reentry Coalition, and second the request that Megan just made.
5:17:17
We operate a range of alternative to incarceration programs that served over 1,800 people last year, keeping those individuals from the harms of incarceration while improving safety in our communities and ensuring that folks have the services that they need.
5:17:32
We heard from DOC and DOP today about all of the challenges that they face in serving folks with mental health challenges.
5:17:41
And they're not good at it, but providers like us are, and if we were resourced adequately, we could serve those individuals.
5:17:51
So I want to highlight one of our clients, a man named Alfred.
5:17:55
Alfred's in our Nathaniel Alternative to Incarceration program, which is an intensive mental health treatment approach.
5:18:02
Alfred, before he came into our program, spent two and a half years in the state psychiatric facility at Kirby being restored to competency.
5:18:10
This is a person who has struggled with his mental health for a very long time without receiving the services that he needed.
5:18:17
And he entered our program on a violent felony charge.
5:18:20
In his time in our program, we've been able to increase his housing stability.
5:18:24
Alfred is now regularly taking his medication.
5:18:27
He successfully completed his court case and has remained engaged in our services on a voluntary basis and is now looking at enrolling in high school equivalency classes to finish his degree and joining a mental health clubhouse to support his day to day.
5:18:42
This is the kind of transformation that we can achieve when programs like ours are resourced instead of a correctional system that is unable to, not only unable to provide mental healthcare, but unable to maintain the basic safety of the people that it serves.
5:18:58
And so we urge the council to restore the 3,800,000.0 for ATI's, the 8,000,000 for reentry, and to add in the discretionary dollars 2,400,000.0 for ATI programs.
5:19:09
Thank you.