Safety Fair Promotes Health, Wellness, & Crime Prevention
My research offers policymakers a consideration for reducing criminal justice costs while also better serving already vulnerable groups of Americans: increasing access to mental health services.
Measuring the effectiveness of mental health care access has proved difficult because of the lack of data shared and linked between health and law enforcement agencies in the United States. But using administrative data from South Carolina that has been linked across various government agencies, I am able to show that men with a history of mental illness are more likely to be incarcerated after losing access to health care (Jácome 2020)