Book chapter
Heterogeneity in the Mental Health Consequences of Incarceration across Race: Prior Research and New Directions
Handbook on Contemporary Issues in Health, Crime, and Punishment, pp 415-431
2025
Abstract
The burgeoning health criminology literature extensively documents the multidirectional connection between health and criminal legal system involvement, with a large utilization of averaged associations in empirical work producing these conclusions. This chapter seeks to advance this literature by proposing a framework that can be leveraged in new research directions to better understand the heterogeneous consequences of carceral punishment. Our focus is on the varied ways that spending time in correctional facilities affects individuals' mental health during and after release, across race, and over the life span. It is premised on the recognition that race is central to this research because it is highly correlated with both levels of mental health and risks of incarceration. We contend this direction for scholarship is important and necessary in order to more precisely identify how and for whom incarceration is most detrimental. In turn, this increased understanding can serve as foundational evidence that informs strategies and reforms targeted to reduce this disproportionate harm of imprisonment for individuals' mental health.
We begin with a summary of the literature on the mental health impacts of incarceration that provides a general overview of existing work, followed by a detailed accounting of studies of racial variation in this general correlation. Next, we theorize about how individuals' background characteristics may function as sources of variation in the incarceration-mental health association between Black and white persons. We describe how concepts from various theoretical perspectives, such as the social stress process and the life course, can be integrated to build understanding about the sources and magnitude of between-group differences-with a focus on Black/white contrasts-in the consequences of carceral confinement for mental health. To conclude, we discuss how these sources of variation may be incorporated in research designs, either quantitative or qualitative in nature, to improve measurement precision of theorized mechanisms of unequal mental health consequences of incarceration. We contend that advancing research approaches in this way will ultimately build more specific and actionable knowledge on whose mental health is most affected by incarceration. We close by elaborating on how this approach to research can generate findings well suited to informing system policy and practice that reduces the potential for harm to be conferred through incarceration.
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Details
- Title
- Heterogeneity in the Mental Health Consequences of Incarceration across Race
- Creators
- Kathleen PowellRobert Apel
- Contributors
- Nathan W. Link (Editor)Meghan A. Novisky (Editor)Chantal Fahmy (Editor)
- Publication Details
- Handbook on Contemporary Issues in Health, Crime, and Punishment, pp 415-431
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Edition
- 1
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Criminology and Justice Studies
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85209956177
- Other Identifier
- 991021910415704721