2022 Undergraduate Research Symposium: Bahea Nasser My research is overall in the issue of the mass incarceration rate of people with serious mental illness. My research goes into detail about the factors and causes of this problem, re-offending, deinstitutionalization, other important information, and how people with serious mental illness in the criminal justice system receive inadequate treatment.

1. Research on Mental
Illness and
Incarceration
Bahea Nasser
Professor Varty
ENG 3010 - Project 2

2. Overview
RESEARCH
QUESTION
RESEARCH
PROCESS
SYNTHESIS OF
SOURCES
PROBLEMS, GAPS,
QUESTIONS
DEPLOYMENT OF
LITERATURE
REVIEW

3. Research Question
“Why are so many people with mental illness
committing crimes and are ending up in the criminal
justice system?”

4. Research Process
Wayne States library
database system;
looked for the criminal
justice research guide
to find a database.
Used key words for
the database system
to help find resources
that helped answer
research question.
Created Cornell notes and
a synthesis map to help
organize my sources; help
figure out how each source
helps answer research
question.

5. Synthesis of Sources
Color Coding Key
Purpose Causes or Factors Treatment Re-offenses
Deinstitutionalization
other (risk, consequences, public perception, symptoms,
violence/aggression, relationship)

6. People with Serious Mental Illness in the Criminal Justice System: Causes,
Consequences, and Correctives
Criminal Thinking as a Mediator of the Mental Illness–Prison Violence
Relationship: A Path Analytic Study and Causal Mediation Analysis
• Purpose of the article:
• Article argues deinstitutionalization contributed to PSMI in the criminal
justice system, mental illness is not the primary cause of criminal behavior,
crime control policies and drug laws account for the large number of PSMI
in the criminal justice process, and the criminal justice system has made
efforts to accommodate the mentally ill in correctional facilities
• The article give me information on treatment reoffending, how the criminal justice
system helps, the start of the mass incarceration, war on drugs,
deinstitutionalization, environment, and poverty
• purpose of the article:
• The purpose of this study was to figure out whether criminal thinking
mediates the major mental illness- institutional violence relationship in
incarcerated offenders
• The article gives me information on reoffending, violence/aggression, the
environment, and criminal thinking
• poor people don’t have insurance to cover for their help, which causes their
symptoms to be untreated
• treating mental illness alone is unlikely to prevent or reduce crime or reoffending.
• Correctional facilities became the largest treatment place for PSMI
• The causes of of PSMI in the CRJ system are they are arrested for small offices
caused by their mental illness, drug possession since they have easier access to it
because of where most PSMI live, committing crimes that come from their mental
illness, antisocial disorder, criminal thinking, their overall environment because
PSMI usually live in poor/high crime areas, poverty
• The war on drugs and the high rate of drug use and psychiatric disorders are
causes the mass incarceration of PSMI
• There's more Violent reoffending with MMI inmates compared to non-MMI
inmates:
• In state (53.4% vs. 44.9%),
• In federal (43.7% vs. 21.6%),
• In local jail (46.0% vs. 31.6%)
• criminal thinking mediates the relationship between MMI and institutional violence
• MMI had a direct effect on IR-Agg and MMI had a mediated effect on IR-Agg from
GCT.
• GCT score predicted physically aggressive infractions at a statistically significant
level with effect sizes that were small to moderate in magnitude for both mentally
ill and nonmentally ill inmates.
• mentally ill offenders were similar to noncriminal psychiatric patients on psychiatric
symptomatology and to nonmentally ill offenders on criminal thinking measures
• Facilities that are chaotic and poorly run tend to aggravate the mentally ill
• Aggression is triggered by environments
• Criminal thinking plays a role in improving MMI offenders of avoiding reoffending
• criminal thinking successfully mediating the relationship between a history of
serious mental illness and physically aggressive institutional infractions.

7. TIME TO PRISON RETURN FOR OFFENDERS WITH SERIOUS MENTAL ILLNESS
RELEASED FROM PRISON: A Survival Analysis
Mental illness, crime, and violence: Risk, context, and social control
• Purpose of the article:
• Is to determine recidivism rates for offenders with mental illness
returning to the Utah State Prison.
• The article gives me information on reoffending, the drugs, parole, mental
health housing and medication use, treatment, differences between SMI and
non-SMI groups, demographic descriptors of SMI population, the overall SMI
population
• Purpose of the article:
• Is to discuss the relationship between mental illness, crime, and violence.
• The article gives me information on deinstitutionalization, the public perception of mental illness and
danger/violence, the symptoms of PSMI, the demographics, violence, managing people with mental illnesses
• Lack of treatment increases behaviors, which, lead to repeated incarceration
• offenders with SMI do have higher rates of recidivism
• incarceration and mental illness relates to :
• homelessness, substance abuse
• gender differences in rates of mental illness
• higher rates of reoffending
• Lack of adequate treatment is worsened by the fact that the most mentally ill
prisoners will be reincarcerated
• Key differences between SMI and non-SMI groups
• SMI and non-SMI groups are different gender-wise
• women overrepresent the SMI group
• Hispanics underrepresented the SMI group
• factors related to mental illness, release history, and conditions of
returning to prison distinguished SMI group from non-SMI group are
• There is lots of diversity in the SMI population
• Gender
• personal history
• symptoms,
• acuity and chronicity,
• degree of disability
• life situation.
• Factors that cause deinstitutionalization for the mentally ill are:
• development of medicine that controlled symptoms of PSMI
• ideological shift that led states to adopt stricter legal standards for involuntary confinement
• financial changes and budget cut
• mentally ill and homeless people most likely live in “socially disorganized” neighborhoods because of:
• deinstitutionalization,
• lack of long-term care facilities
• selection processes that limit job and residential opportunities
• disturbing behavior that would have been handled with medicine before deinstitutionalization is now treated as
criminal behavior.
• This is the reason why so many PSMI have an increasingly high risk of violent behavior and victimization.
• the economic disadvantages of mentally ill patients cause them to be discharged from hospitals into the community
• Majority of Americans associate mental illness with psychosis
• they use words like “nuts”, “deranged”, or “out of one’s mind” to describe PSMI
• Americans connected causes of these disorders to:
• chemical imbalances
• genetic factors
• stressful life circumstances
• people associate mental illness with:
• Dangerousness
• Violence
• unpredictability
• People who associate mental illness with psychosis are more likely to associate PSMI with dangerousness and are
less willing to marry, live near, socialize, work with, etc.
• Media creates a bad perception of people with mental illnesses
• When mental illness is viewed as being under control the person is more likely to avoid, withhold help, and endorse
coercive treatment.
• When mentally ill people are seen as responsible for causing their condition, it leads to decreased feelings of pity
and increased feelings of anger and fear.
• certain beliefs about mental illness can increase discrimination towards PSMI
• aggressive behaviors symptoms and coping mechanisms
• depressive symptoms weaken family attachments, which can lead to further depression and aggressive behavior

8. ‘‘Madness’’ and penal confinement: Some observations on mental illness and
prison pain
SEX OFFENDING AND SERIOUS MENTAL ILLNESS: Directions for Policy and
Research
• Purpose of article:
• Is to discuss the causes of the flood of the mentally ill in correctional
facilities
• The article gives me information environments, reoffending, and the suffering
people with mental illnesses go through
• Purpose of the article:
• Is to find the relationship between sex offending and serious mental
illness. It focuses on the organizational, policy, and practice considerations
that affect the management. The researchers recognized that this topic has
been underexplored.
• The article gives me with information on how mental illness and sex offenses
relate and the risks of reoffending.
• If you were mentally ill in the past, your mental illness can come back in prison
• mentally ill people have a history of trauma, from poverty to all kinds of abuses
and negligence
• lots of mentally ill people with substance use disorders are put on psychotic
drugs
• conditions of confinement and forms of mistreatment put prisoners at risk of
serious harm
• environments cause prisoners to have more stress and psychological pain daily’s
• harsh practices can cause mentally ill prisoners to cycling
• lots of mentally ill people have early childhood trauma
• mentally ill prisoners are often treated by understaffed, over- worked,
inexperienced, and insufficiently skilled mental health staff
• Prisoners become suicidal in confinement because they cannot tolerate the
painful suffering, they experience there,
• mental health can worsen in stressful, hostile, or psychologically abusive settings,
especially in confinement and forms mistreatment in prison place all prisoners at
risk
• the nature of prison emotionally distressed prisoners, it can give them a greater
risk of becoming more seriously disabled.
• Others in the CRJ system makes mentally ill prisoners less in the eyes of other
inmates because to others it implies that they are weak, cannot be relied on, or
are necessarily allied with and overly dependent on the prison staff
• Offenders Have a risk of noncompliance with registration requirements, which
get them back into the CRJ system
• the risk of reoffending is linked to not having a stable housing, employment, and
social supports
• For PSMI and sex offender populations, maintaining steady employment
protects them from reoffending
• PSMI can take part in behaviors that lack serious sexual violence but might
qualify them as sex offenders under state sex offender registration laws.
• “nuisance” sexual behavior can be associated with the risk of more serious sexual
assaults.
• PSMI show higher risks of CRJ involvement and a higher risk of violent behavior
than those without mental illness
• higher risk might be because untreated psychiatric symptoms and
criminal involvement is tied to the higher occurrence of criminogenic
factors among the SMI population
• substance use disorders, psychopathy, and personality disorders are also the
most predictors of violent behavior among PSMI
• Lots of PSMI enter the CRJ system for nonviolent offenses, that come from
untreated psychotic symptoms

9. Problems, Gaps,
Questions
• No problems or gaps
• Additional Questions:
• Where are the families of people with mental illnesses in the criminal
justice systems?
• Do they have siblings?
• Are their parents still alive?
• Why are they alone?
• Why are correctional facilities not looking into whether an inmate has a
mental illness?
• Why aren’t inmates getting checked for mental
illnesses before entering the prion system?
• Shouldn't the criminal justice system check all
inmates physical and mental health before
incarcerating a person?
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA-NC

10. Deployment of
Literature Review
In response to a national issue on people
with mental illness being incarcerated and
recycling through the criminal justice
system, I argue:
• The criminal justice system
needs to check for inmates with
mental illnesses before they
incarcerate them and that
correctional facilities shouldn’t
be responsible for taking care
of mentally ill people, they
need to find proper and stable
homes for the mentally ill, not
just keep them on the streets or
throwing them in prison.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

11. REFERENCES
Cloyes, Kristin G., et al. “Time to
Prison Return for Offenders with
Serious Mental Illness Released
From Prison.” Criminal Justice and
Behavior, vol. 37, no. 2, 2010, pp.
175–187.,
doi:10.1177/0093854809354370.
Haney, Craig. “‘Madness’ and Penal
Confinement: Some Observations
on Mental Illness and Prison Pain.”
Punishment & Society, vol. 19,
no. 3, 2017, pp. 310–326.,
doi:10.1177/1462474517705389.
Harris, Andrew J., et al. "Sex
Offending and Serious Mental
Illness: Directions for Policy and
Research." Criminal Justice and
Behavior, vol. 37, no. 5, May 2010,
p. 596-612.
doi:10.1177/0093854810363773
Lurigio, Arthur J. “People With
Serious Mental Illness in the
Criminal Justice System.” The
Prison Journal, vol. 91, no. 3_suppl,
2011,
doi:10.1177/0032885511415226
Markowitz, Fred E. “Mental Illness,
Crime, and Violence: Risk, Context,
and Social Control.” Aggression
and Violent Behavior, vol. 16, no. 1,
2011, pp. 36–44.,
doi:10.1016/j.avb.2010.10.003.
Walters, Glenn D. “Criminal
Thinking as a Mediator of the
Mental Illness–Prison Violence
Relationship: A Path Analytic Study
and Causal Mediation Analysis.”
Psychological Services, vol. 8, no. 3,
2011, pp. 189–199.,
doi:10.1037/a0024684.