Poster #236 - Toward Holistic Social Service Interventions: A Latent Class Analysis of Co-Occurring Needs

• In Event: ASC Poster Session I

Abstract

Social service needs such as mental health, substance use, housing, education, employment, and health are criminogenic risk factors that may incumber defendants’ abilities to navigate their criminal court matters. As such, many community-based interventions and diversion programs assess for the presence of these needs and strategically design interventions to address these needs with hopes of both improving case outcomes and minimizing future risk of court involvement. However, these needs are often identified and intervened upon as discrete phenomena, which leads to siloed prevention and treatment of the impacts these social service needs have on clients. Using programmatic data from one community-based alternatives to incarceration (ATI) program in a Northeastern U.S. city between 2023 and 2024 (n=963), this analysis focuses on the majority (52%) of clients who were flagged as having three or more social service needs simultaneously. This research uses Latent Class Analysis (LCA) to identify distinct classes demonstrating the intersections of these needs and explores the social factors that might explain these classes. These classes can be used to improve intervention design by addressing these co-occurrences more holistically.

Authors

• Lars Gundersen, Center for Justice Innovation

• Conor Mulvaney, Center for Justice Innovation