Surveillance as a Social Determinant of Health: Understanding the Impact of Pending Charges on Health Outcomes

• In Event: Health Criminology: Pretrial Health

Abstract

Previous scholars have considered the impact of arrest, conviction, and incarceration on mental health but there is less information about people with pending cases, specifically. For people with pending charges, the experience of awaiting adjudication is imbued with a lot of certainty in terms of how long one must wait to be adjudicated, as well as what the outcome of the charges might and what sentence, if any, might be imposed. Further, scholars have shown how uncertainty can create anxiety or cause worry. Even so, very little is known about how the uncertainty of pending charges can influence one’s mental health. This study seeks to fill this gap by asking the following question: What relationship do pending charges have with feelings of anxiety? To do so, I utilize N=7433 individual-level observations from Wave 3 of the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study to conduct logistic regression with several models. Findings show that people with pending charges are twice as likely to experience feelings of anxiety, suggesting that there is a clear positive association between pending charges and anxiety.

Author

• Erin Eife, George Mason University