Elevated Risk of Being Charged with a Crime for People with a Severe and Persistent Mental Illness

Abstract

This paper examines the criminal justice involvement of people served in a statewide system of care for people with severe and persistent mental illness, a concern of both the mental health and the law enforcement communities. Rates at which service recipients were charged with a crime were determined using Probabilistic Population Estimation to measure the number of people shared between anonymous data sets. Results indicate that members of the treatment group were significantly more likely to get into trouble with the law than members of the general population. Elevated risk is substantially greater for women and for older treatment recipients.