Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Text on screen: Vera Institute of Justice
Vera Voices Podcast Series
Neil A. ***, Research Speaker Series, presents: Jim Parsons, Director, Substance Use and Mental Health Program
Women's Life-Course Pathways to Justice-System Involvement with Jim Parsons
My name is Jim Parsons, and I direct a program at Vera that focuses on the substance use and mental health needs
of people who are involved in the justice system.
I'll be talking today about some work that we've conducted on the life histories of mentally ill women
who are involved in justice systems.
As part of the work that we've been doing in the research program that I direct,
we've been looking at the mental health needs of people who are involved in the justice system.
What we've found is that, for women that are in the New York City jail system,
rates of mental illness are nearly three times than for men.
This finding is also confirmed by studies that have been conducted elsewhere in the country
which tend to find that incarcerated women have roundabout twice the rate of mental health problems as their male counterparts.
This got us thinking about conducting research
which looked at the pathways that women follow that lead them to be involved in the justice system.
We know that many of the risk factors for mental illness and for criminal justice involvement are similar,
relating to histories of abuse and victimization, and drug use.
However, we are interested in finding out how these kinds of problems combine and how they sequence and combine
to lead to women with mental illness being arrested and being; finding themselves in prisons and jails.
One approach to gathering information on the sequencing of events is the use of a technique called "life history calendars."
This is a research method which allows researchers to map out different types of behavior or activities on a; in a grid format.
So, it's possible to compare the sequencing and timing of different life events on the same time scale.
So, for example, you can use this technique to understand at what age somebody left school,
whether somebody got married before they moved into their first home.
And so it's a way of both mapping out events against each other
and also helping interview subjects recall events which may have occurred some time ago.
We used this technique to interview a group of women, asking them about the timing of a variety of different life events.
Because of the focus of our research, these events included the first time they used drugs and when they used drugs regularly,
when they first realized they had a mental health problem, timing of criminal justice involvement,
and also receipt of treatment services and other kinds of interventions
as well as some other questions about living situation, relationship status, birth of children, and these kinds of issues also.
We used the life history calendar to interview 10 women who were attending a drug treatment service in New York City.
These women were identified both because they had a diagnosed psychiatric disorder and because they were judged
to be stable enough to complete the interview with a limited risk of retraumatization.
The questions were obviously detailed.
We were asking about histories of victimization and abuse, so these were difficult interviews to complete.
We interviewed women over two time periods; two sessions, each lasting between an hour and an hour and a half.
The women that we spoke with, as well as having a psychiatric diagnosis, were all drug users
(obviously we interviewed them in a drug treatment setting), and were aged between 31 and 43 at the time of interview.
First of all, we found that most of the women that we spoke with had experienced victimization in their past.
All of them reported physical abuse, and half of the sample of 10 women reported some form of *** victimization in their past.
Also, as I mentioned, all reported drug use.
In terms of the sequencing of events in their lives, most reported that they started using hard drugs
before they realized they had a mental health problem; on average several years before they realized that they had a mental health problem.
And then, for most of the sample, their first arrest happened after both they'd started using drugs
and they realized that they needed help with their mental health.
However, despite, for most of the women that we spoke with, drug use and realization of mental illness,
happened before they were arrested, for the vast majority, they didn't receive treatment
until after they had become involved in the criminal justice system.
This obviously represents a substantial window of opportunity where services which aim to provide treatment
and to reduce the risk of future criminal justice involvement could become involved earlier in the lives of these women
and hopefully reduce the risk that they will go on to be arrested and held in jails and prisons.
It's important to note that this is a pilot study, and we only interviewed a small sample of women.
We interviewed just ten people.
Also, I should note that we only asked women to report those events that occurred after the age of 18.
When you are looking at these kinds of issues, of course, early life experience is very important.
So, it's worthwhile to note that as part of this pilot research we didn't document early life experiences.
Again, this was partly because we were trying out some of these methods, testing our approach,
and we didn't know whether the women would be able to respond to difficult,
potentially retraumatizing questions about events that occurred early in their life.
However, now we have experience from this small-scale pilot study,
we've found that woman are able to answer these questions without experiencing traumatization.
In fact, a number of the people who we interviewed reported their participation in the research
was actually a positive experience and they appreciated the ability to tell their stories.
We now hope to expand this work to a larger sample to include women in a broader array of settings, including criminal justice settings,
to find out if these preliminary findings are maintained when we increase the size and scope of our work.
Vera Institute of Justice, Vera Voices Podcast Series
Neil A. ***, Research Speaker Series, presents: Jim Parsons, Director, Substance Use and Mental Health Program