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Depression treatment for black inmates
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mentallyill-black-crime.md

##Pitch: How are black inmates screened and treated for depression? Slug: mentallyill-black-inmates

####Who cares? Those suffering from mental illness, families with someone who has mental illness, [black] activists/organizations, people concerned about the costs of prisons ####Why do we care now?

In the past year, there has been national media attention on several instances of police violence against black mentally ill suspects and inmates. On March 9, 27-year-old Anthony Hill, an unarmed black male suffering from bipolar disorder, was fatally shot by a police officer in Georgia. An episode of This American Life, aired Feb. 13, “Cops See it Differently, Part Two,” detailed a black mentally ill man’s struggle with being harassed by the police.

Already in 2015, conditions within prisons have received national media attention (e.g. Rikers, Attica …). Rikers has been under fire for the mistreatment of several documented mentally ill inmates, including the death of one. We will look at data about the prevalence of mental illness among inmates (particularly black inmates) and the kinds of treatment options that are offered.

####Our key datasets so far:

Dataset #1: From the Bureau of Justice Statistics (from 2006) (Zip file containing the csvs and metadata)

  • mhppjit03.csv Table 3. Prison and jail inmates who had a mental health problem, by selected characteristics
  • mhppjitt05.csv Table 5. Mental health treatment received by all local jail inmates
  • mhppjit04.csv Table 4. Homelessness, employment before arrest, and family background of prison and jail inmates, by mental health status
  • mhppjit14.csv Table 14. Mental health treatment received by inmates who had a mental health problem
  • mhppjit15.csv Table 15. Mental health treatment received by all State prison inmates, 2004 and 1997

Dataset #2: From “Mental Health of Prisoners,” a December 2014 “American Journal of Public Health” article by two University of Texas researchers. From the methods section: “In summary, 14,499 state and 3,686 federal prisoners were surveyed using both direct in-person interviewing (for demographic information) and computer-assisted personal interviewing because of the sensitive nature of many items on the questionnaire. The response rate was 89.8% for inmates in the state sample and 86.7% for those in the federal sample.”

We will need to talk to people with more academic research/statistics knowledge to have them explain the data sets to us to make sure we’re understanding them correctly.

The full text is available with help from CUNY's research center, and the abstract is available on the American Public Health Association's website. The tables are available as csvs in Julia's Dropbox folder (thanks, Tabula!).

Dataset #3: Gender, Mental Illness and Crime, 2004 Study performed by Melissa Thompson of Portland State University, distributed by Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research and funded by the United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs and National Institute of Justice

Includes data on depression, drug use, treatment, race and gender. It’s a huge tab-separated file. There are 55,602 rows and and 3,011 columns (wow!), and a user guide and codebook to help navigate it. (Zip file)

####Other examples and resources we found while pre-reporting:

News articles:

  • Black, mentally ill inmate left for dead in cell at Rikers Island (NYTimes, Jan 2015)
  • Additional reports from Rikers inmates, including one mentally ill, being seriously injured by corrections officers (NYTimes, Feb 2015)
  • Attica prison, three guards on trial for the severe beating of an African American inmate (NYTimes, March 2015)
  • This American Life episode. Black mentally ill man is constantly arrested by police while working at a store (WBEZ, Feb 2015)
  • USA Today series on mental illness and law enforcement (USA Today, July 2014)
  • How the Charlotte Observer “looked into the deaths of the mentally ill using death records, police records, autopsy reports and 911 calls” via IRE, PDF

Agency and NGO reports:

Other data sources:

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