Jac A. Charlier, MPA
Executive Director, TASC Center for Health and Justice
Email Jac
A national expert in crime reduction
and pre-arrest diversion, Jac Charlier specializes in practical solutions that
bring together justice system partners, behavioral health service providers,
and community leaders in common aims of creating safer, healthier communities.
Jac is a leading voice and visionary in
the emerging movement toward deflection and pre-arrest diversion as standard
practice, whereby law enforcement officers will, whenever appropriate, deflect
people with substance use disorders and mental health issues to treatment in
the community rather than arrest or ignore them.
Jac’s career has been devoted to solutions that reduce crime and drug use by
bridging criminal justice systems—from police to prosecutors to courts to
probation to parole—with behavioral health services in the community.
He is also a recognized civic leader in the Chicagoland area and brings
his years of successful grassroots experience to work in developing justice
solutions grounded in the context of the community.
Since 2011, Jac has led the growth and evolution of TASC’s Center for Health and Justice, which provides national and international consulting, training, public policy strategy, and research dissemination to help create more just justice systems. Under Jac’s leadership, CHJ regularly advises counties and state systems across the US, while also developing curricula and providing consultation services for countries across the globe.
As the co-founder in 2017 of the
national Police, Treatment
and Community Collaborative (PTACC) and a leader in justice system
strategies to fight the national opioid epidemic, Jac led the development of a
framework for preventing and reducing opioid overdose and death among justice
populations, as well as community-based post-overdose response strategies for
law enforcement.
Jac joined
TASC in 2011, bringing 16
years of service in the Parole Division of the Illinois Department of
Corrections, where he specialized in building connections
between parole and the community, and transferring innovations from research
into practice. Beginning as a street parole officer, he rose through the ranks
to become the deputy chief of parole, leading system-wide parole operations for
the Chicago metropolitan area. In the Parole Division, he started the first parole
domestic violence reduction initiative and the first gender-specific caseload
supervision system.
Jac
is a faculty member with the National Judicial College for the Justice Leaders
Systems Change Initiative (JLSCI), a general jurisdiction court
systems change approach to reducing drug use and recidivism while promoting
recovery. He served
as the criminal justice representative for the Institutional Review Board (IRB)
at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is an adjunct faculty member at
several Chicago-area universities, where he teaches criminal justice courses
around ethics, leadership, research, and management. He also speaks regularly
on the topics of civic engagement, community building, and criminal justice
reform.
Jac is a military veteran of the US Army, current board chair of Chicago Veterans, and a member of the American Legion. He also is an Eagle Scout and past chair of the National Eagle Scout Association, Chicagoland Chapter. Jac received his MPA from the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University and his BS in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana.