Many jails are poorly equipped to provide mental health services due to their size or locale, lack of funding of mental health agencies, a lack of cooperation and communication between the facility and the mental health service provider, and increasing caseloads of mental health professionals. The success of a project to apply telemedicine to the Federal prison system led to a successful project sponsored by NIJ to use telemedicine to provide mental health services to a Kansas jail. The Beaufort County project began in 1999 after unsuccessful attempts to obtain funding for a mental health counselor to the facility staff and a deterioration in the level of service provided. The detention center agreed to provide an ISDN line capable of transmitting images without loss of signal, a private area for inmate interviews, and an onsite medical professional to assist with the interview. The facility has used telemedicine for competency evaluations, suicide risk assessments, the development of a treatment plan for an inmate requiring behavior modification, and other purposes. The staff expect that the number of mental health consultations will increase and hope that all security staff will receive mental health training in the next year. Source of additional information and 1 reference