The Overrepresentation of Persons with Co-Occurring Disorders in the Criminal Justice System

• In Event: 3245 - Pathways to Social Justice

Abstract

Persons with co-occurring disorders (COD) are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Not only are they at greater risk of arrest, they are also disproportionately represented among state prisoners and jail inmates. In this paper, we consider the role of procedural injustices, which feed a distrust in the legal system and law enforcement agents and thus erodes individuals’ willingness to obey the law. Drawing from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 118 low-level offenders in the San Francisco Bay Area, we find that a much higher percentage of persons with COD reported police-based procedural injustices, and such reports were associated with much higher levels of legal cynicism and an unwillingness to obey the law. However, despite the fact that police officers were the direct source of violent and aggressive procedural injustices, persons with COD reported higher than expected perceptions of police legitimacy. We explain this paradox by noting possible neighborhood effects. Specifically, persons with COD were more likely to reside in neighborhoods they considered unsafe. There, police officers’ patterns of behavior were in part understood as a function of the violent and disordered contexts officers patrolled. This understanding produced more tempered views of the police’s illegitimacy than anticipated.

Authors

• Sandra S. Smith, University of California, Berkeley

• Jaqueline Lepe, University of California, Berkeley

• Carmen Marie Brick, UC Berkeley

• Shirin Purkayastha, University of California, Berkeley