Forensic Peer Specialists: An Emerging Workforce

Forensic Peer Specialists are part of an emerging workforce comprised of individuals with a history of mental illness and incarceration who have achieved a reasonable degree of stability in their own lives and are now employed by local government and non-profit agencies to provide individualized support to others with both psychiatric disabilities and criminal justice involvements. However, since the field is new, qualifications and responsibilities are defined variously from site to site. This Policy Brief, based on an informal national environmental scan with Forensic Peer Specialist programs across the county in 2011, seeks to define what we know at present about this new workforce and to establish a research agenda for the future.