Description: Explores the neuroscience of trauma, common behavioral patterns, and keys to successful trauma-informed service delivery within the criminal and juvenile justice systems. Ethics, diversity, and advocacy are integrated into a discussion on engagement, assessment, intervention, and evaluation strategies for social workers providing direct service and organizational/community-based service in forensic settings.

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will be able to articulate the basic neuroscience that underscores the behavioral patterns commonly seen in justice-involved populations.
2. Participants will formulate a foundation process of building the 4 stages of trauma-informed care.
3. Participants will develop a trauma-informed skill-set within the social work practice framework of engagement, assessment, intervention, and evaluation.

Dr. Ali Winters is an Associate Professor of Practice in the College of Social Work at the University of Tennessee. She earned her DSW from the University of Tennessee in 2015, her MSW from the University of Alabama in 1996, and her BSSW from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1992. With over 30 years of direct social work practice experience, Dr. Winters' primary areas of social work practice have been forensic social work in corrections and juvenile justice, direct trauma-based service delivery, program development and evaluation, and behavioral health in healthcare settings. Dr. Winters has also been active in providing clinical supervision and leadership since earning her LCSW in 2005. Her areas of research interest include mental health and solitary confinement, forensic social work ethics, trauma-informed care, and secondary traumatic stress.