Executive Director, TASC Center for Health and Justice
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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.