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Columbia Law School

Health Law and Policy

Mental health

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Law

Police Contact And Mental Health, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom R. Tyler Jan 2017

Police Contact And Mental Health, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom R. Tyler

Faculty Scholarship

Although an effective police presence is widely regarded as critical to public safety, less is known about the effects of police practices on mental health and community wellbeing. Adolescents and young adults in specific neighborhoods of urban areas are likely to experience assertive contemporary police practices. This study goes beyond research on policing effects on legal socialization to assess the effects of police contact on the mental health of those stopped by the police. We collected and analyzed data in a two wave survey of young men in New York City (N=717) clustered in the neighborhoods with the highest rates …


Aggressive Policing And The Mental Health Of Young Urban Men, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom Tyler, Bruce Link Jan 2014

Aggressive Policing And The Mental Health Of Young Urban Men, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom Tyler, Bruce Link

Faculty Scholarship

Objectives: We provide the first population-based analysis of the health implications of contemporary policing. Many cities have adopted “proactive” policing models, which engage citizens – often aggressively – at low levels of suspicion. We survey young men on their experiences of police encounters and subsequent mental health. Methods: We conducted a population-based phone survey of 1,261 young men in New York City. Respondents reported how many times they were approached by New York Police Department (NYPD) officers, what these encounters entailed, any trauma they attributed to the stops, and their overall anxiety. Data were analyzed using cross-sectional regression. Results: Respondents …


Reducing Mass Incarceration: Lessons From The Deinstitutionalization Of Mental Hospitals In The 1960s, Bernard Harcourt Jan 2011

Reducing Mass Incarceration: Lessons From The Deinstitutionalization Of Mental Hospitals In The 1960s, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In a message to Congress in 1963, President John F. Kennedy outlined a federal program designed to reduce by half the number of persons in custody. The institutions at issue were state hospitals and asylums for the mentally ill, and the number of such persons in custody was staggeringly large, in fact comparable to contemporary levels of mass incarceration in prisons and jails. President Kennedy's message to Congress – the first and perhaps only presidential message to Congress that dealt exclusively with the issue of institutionalization in this country – proposed replacing state mental hospitals with community mental health centers, …


An Institutionalization Effect: The Impact Of Mental Hospitalization And Imprisonment On Homicide In The United States, 1934-2001, Bernard E. Harcourt Jan 2011

An Institutionalization Effect: The Impact Of Mental Hospitalization And Imprisonment On Homicide In The United States, 1934-2001, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Previous research suggests that mass incarceration in the United States may have contributed to lower rates of violent crime since the 1990s but, surprisingly, finds no evidence of an effect of imprisonment on violent crime prior to 1991. This raises what Steven Levitt has called “a real puzzle.” This study offers the solution to the puzzle: the error in all prior studies is that they focus exclusively on rates of imprisonment, rather than using a measure that combines institutionalization in both prisons and mental hospitals. Using state-level panel-data regressions over the 68-year period from 1934 to 2001 and controlling for …