Beyond Incarceration: The Consequences of Criminal Justice Contact for Mental Health

• In Event: 550 - Section on Medical Sociology Paper Session. Health and the Carceral State

Abstract

A growing literature documents the deleterious consequences of incarceration for mental health. Although salient, incarceration is only one form of custodial citizenship in the United States and, accordingly, considering only incarceration may mask the extent to which the criminal justice system is associated with poor mental health. In this paper, we use the stress process paradigm, along with nationally representative survey data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), to examine the relationship between criminal justice contact—defined as arrest, conviction, and incarceration—and mental health. First, we find that arrest and conviction are more commonly experienced than incarceration and that, similar to incarceration, arrest and conviction are concentrated among race/ethnic minority and economically disadvantaged individuals. Second, results from fixed-effects models, which adjust for stable characteristics of respondents, document that arrest, conviction, and incarceration have similar deleterious consequences for mental health. Third, we find that the association between criminal justice contact and mental health is concentrated among those who resided in highly disadvantaged neighborhoods during adolescence. Taken together, these results suggest that the consequences of criminal justice system contact for mental health have been vastly underestimated.

Author

• Naomi F. Sugie, UC Irvine