Individuals In Jails Research Articles

Screening and Access to Services for Individuals with Serious Mental Illnesses in Jails

High rates of serious mental illnesses (SMI) among jail inmates pose challenges for the criminal justice system and risks for the individual with SMI. Research has identified actions to address these issues; it is unclear to what extent they have been operationalized. This study examines jails in one state, exploring how individuals with SMI are identified and treated, and comparing these with research-based recommendations. Results indicate that jails are not using evidence-based screenings, staff require training in SMI, access to services and medications for jailed individuals with SMI is often slow, and coordination between community providers and jails is limited.

Assessing the Economic Costs of Serious Mental Illness

Assessing the Economic Costs of Serious Mental Illness

Jail Incarceration, Homelessness, and Mental Health: A National Study

Jail Incarceration, Homelessness, and Mental Health: A National Study

Jail Incarceration, Homelessness, and Mental Health: A National Study

This study sought to investigate the rates and correlates of homelessness, especially mental illness, among adult jail inmates. Data from a national survey of jail inmates (N=6,953) were used to compare the proportion of jail inmates who had been homeless in the previous year with the proportion of persons in the general population who had been homeless in the previous year, after standardization to the age, race and ethnicity, and gender distribution of the jail sample. Logistic regression was then used to examine the extent to which homelessness among jail inmates was associated with factors such as symptoms or treatment of mental illness, previous criminal justice involvement, specific recent crimes, and demographic characteristics. Inmates who had been homeless (that is, those who reported an episode of homelessness anytime in the year before incarceration) made up 15.3% of the U.S. jail population, or 7.5 to 11.3 times the standardized estimate of 1.36% to 2.03% in the general U.S. adult population. In comparison with other inmates, those who had been homeless were more likely to be currently incarcerated for a property crime, but they were also more likely to have past criminal justice system involvement for both nonviolent and violent offenses, to have mental health and substance abuse problems, to be less educated, and to be unemployed. Recent homelessness was 7.5 to 11.3 times more common among jail inmates than in the general population. Homelessness and incarceration appear to increase the risk of each other, and these factors seem to be mediated by mental illness and substance abuse, as well as by disadvantageous sociodemographic characteristics.

Enhancing Linkages to HIV Primary Care in Jail Settings: Report on a Consultants’ Meeting

More than 750,000 individuals are held in the nation's jails each day, but over 9 million pass through jails each year. The high turnover presents both opportunities and challenges in providing HIV testing in jails and linking HIV-infected inmates to services during incarceration and after release. Helping high-risk individuals in jails learn their HIV status and linking them to care is an important public health opportunity. The Health Resources and Services Administration is sponsoring a Special Projects of National Significance initiative to enhance linkages to primary care in jail settings through local demonstration projects. The Rollins School of Public Health and Abt Associates serve as the evaluation and support center for the initiative. A consultancy meeting was convened to review program models and strategies for HIV testing and linkages to HIV care in jails and in the community. This report highlights the critical issues that must be considered in implementing the demonstrations.

Criminal Law. Alabama Raises the Rates at Which Individuals in Jail for Nonpayment of Fines Earn out Their Debts. H. B. 95, Reg. Sess. (Ala. 2002) (Codified at Ala. Code Section 15-18-62 (1995 & Supp. 2002))

Criminal Law. Alabama Raises the Rates at Which Individuals in Jail for Nonpayment of Fines Earn out Their Debts. H. B. 95, Reg. Sess. (Ala. 2002) (Codified at Ala. Code Section 15-18-62 (1995 & Supp. 2002))

Immunization strategies to control a community-wide hepatitis A epidemic.

One fifth of 527 cases of hepatitis A occurred in self-identified injection drug users during a community-wide epidemic in Spokane County (Washington) in 1997-8. We hypothesized that an immunization campaign targeted at illicit drug users could control the epidemic. Starting in May 1998, hepatitis A vaccine was provided to individuals in jails and other sites frequented by illicit drug users. Volunteers at vaccination sites were surveyed about risk. Serial convenience samples of jail inmates who denied previous vaccination were anonymously tested for hepatitis A virus (HAV) immunoglobulin G (IgG). From May to December 1998, 2765 high-risk individuals were vaccinated against hepatitis A. The proportion of HAV IgG seropositive inmates increased from 30% to more than 50%. Our findings suggest that vaccination along with naturally occurring infection increased the rate of hepatitis A immunity among illicit drug users during the final months of the epidemic. This supports the hypothesis that targeted immunization of high risk groups may shorten the natural history of a community-wide epidemic.

Punishment, Deterrence and Social Control: The Paradox of Punishment in Minority Communities

Since the early 1970s, the number of individuals in jails and state and federal prisons has grown exponentially. Today, nearly 2 million people are currently incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails. The growth of imprisonment has been borne disproportionately by African-American and Hispanic men from poor communities in urban areas. Rising incarceration should have greatly reduced the crime rate. After all, incapacitated offenders were no longer free to rob, assault, steal, or commit other crimes. However, no large scale reduction in crime was detected until the mid-1990's. The failure of crime rates to decline commensurately with increases in the rate and severity of punishment reveals a paradox of punishment: recent experiments have shown that among persons of color, especially those who are poor or reside in poor neighborhoods, harsher punishment has produced iatrogenic or counterdeterrent effects.Two processes are identified that produced punishment paradoxes or defiance of legal sanctions. First, the long-term and spatially concentrated shift of social and economic resources from informal social controls to formal legal controls, particularly incarceration, weakens localized informal social controls and creates recurring cycles of discontrol. Neighborhood and work contexts offer social status and mete out shame and social opprobria for wrongdoing. However, stable rates of inequality and deprivation in minority communities compromise three dimensions of social control: social capital or regulation, stakes in conformity through marriage and work, and participation in political institutions. Second, high rates of punishment produce stigma saturation where punishment loses its contingent value that lends credibility to its claims of fairness and proportionality. As the social and cultural distance between the punishers and the punished widens, respect for the legitimacy of punishment suffers. Dissatisfaction with both procedural and distributive justice can motivate legal cynicism and noncompliance, and these processes are intensified in contexts of weak social control and high legal control. As legal control replaces informal social control, the state's role in socialization and the fostering of moral communities diminishes. The devolving of the public sector involvement in socialization further moots the reintegrative functions of punishment. This restructuring and devaluation of government, accompanied by the restructuring and fragmentation of economic activity in poor communities, complicates the achievement of a social consensus on the rationale of punishment in a broader context of social control, and limits the efficacy of informal processes of social regulation.

Thinking about private prisons

At present, there are more than twenty companies in the United States, taking in more than $250 million in annual revenues, that operate private jails and prisons. These companies incarcerate about 50,000 inmates, a relatively small portion of the estimated 1.5 million individuals in jails and prisons across the country. Still, such private facilities are growing at four times the rate of state facilities.[1] The administration of legal punishment has long been the province of the state. But the growth in private prisons indicates that, to some extent, governments are modifying their traditional roles in relation to legal offenders. We are, by now, familiar with proposals to privatize various government operations. It is also commonplace for government agencies to contract with private industries for the provision of certain goods and services. But there are differences between these sorts of real or proposed government-industry relations and those exemplified by the private prisons boom.1 It is quite possible to conceive of the state without presupposing that one of its essential functions is, for instance, to supply postal services to its citizens. However, the enforcement of law, an aspect of which includes the administration of punishment, has been for many political theorists a crucial part of the raison d'etre of the state. Punishment has been seen as a state function in order to limit if not eliminate the influence of private interests over the detection, trial, and sanctioning of lawbreakers -- in short, to ensure that all individuals are treated equally before the law. In theory we strive to create institutions and procedures that punish all and only those who have broken the criminal law. In reality, of course, we know that we often fan short of this ideal. If the criminal justice system is viewed as a continuum that starts with policing and ends with the return of lawbreakers to society, privatization is making inroads at both ends of this continuum. We have private security firms engaged in the detection of law-breaking, and private companies of various kinds involved in the sanctioning of lawbreakers. At first glance these appear to be alarming trends since they represent the intrusion of private interests into the criminal justice system, an intrusion that is officially recognized, indeed encouraged, by the state. Yet perhaps it is possible to see the criminal justice system as consisting of different functions, some of which must remain in the hands of public authorities and others of which can be safely assigned to private enterprises overseen by public authorities. That, at least, is what proponents of privatization maintain. In his book on the subject, Charles Logan argues that, compared to existing public prisons along a range of dimensions, private prisons fare no worse than public ones and may fare better.[3] Logan's discussion covers, among other things, the quality, cost, and security of private prisons. Many of his arguments are quite persuasive.[4] As he makes clear, private prisons are not completely private -- they operate only under the control and authority of the government. This is a crucial point to keep in mind throughout the discussion that follows. We might be skeptical about the effectiveness of such government oversight, but we must concede to the proponents of private prisons that it is presupposed in their arguments. I will also concede that private prisons might provide incarceration facilities that are at least as secure, efficient, well-run, and humane as existing public jails and prisons. As Logan admits, that may not be conceding much, but it is not along these dimensions that my concerns lie. What is striking about Logan's analysis is what it leaves out. He does not question the recent alarming increase in the use of incarceration in the United States, taking it as a given that local, state, and federal governments will require expanded prison facilities. …

Provision of Special Education Services to Youth in Local Jails

The Alexandria Virginia Office of the Sheriff and the Alexandria Virginia Public School Board participated for two years in a state funded grant which focused on the delivery of special education services and regular compulsory education services to juveniles and young adults through the age of 21 years who were committed to the Alexandra Adult Detention Center. Provision of special education services to eligible individuals in jails is a unique concept and rarely provided given the transient, short-term nature of the population and other demands of the setting. The program model of team teaching supported full time inclusion of special education students with the general and compulsory education programs in the jail.

Alcohol, other drugs, and criminality: a structural analysis.

The authors examine a model which specifies the relationships among criminality and the use of alcohol and other drugs. A pattern is hypothesized: The initiation of alcohol/drug use tends to progress from legal to illicit drugs; the early initiation of drugs increases the current use of drugs; and criminality is affected by the initiation/use patterns. Analyses based on data collected from individuals in jails, drinking driver programs, alcoholism treatment centers, and on probation indicate that the early onset of legal drug use induces the onset of illicit drug use. Criminality is affected by the current use of alcohol and cocaine. Comparison and contrast of findings from the four groups are provided.