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Abstract
Past research has considered the ways in which criminal justice contact primarily through incarceration impacts the mental health of individuals, families, and communities. However, prior research has yet to consider how the conditions of confinement impacts mental health net of individual factors and how these conditions of confinement might continue to impact individuals after release. Further, prior research has not yet shown the ways in which mass incarceration as a system of inequality might impact population level mental health. In this dissertation, I add to these important gaps in the literature through three distinct yet related manuscripts. My first manuscript uses hierarchical linear modeling to analyze associations between prison conditions and the mental health of currently incarcerated women net of individual factors. Results indicated that the proportion of inmates who did not receive visits from their children in the last month was positively associated with depression even when controlling for individual child visitation. The second manuscript uses structural equation modeling to show how criminal justice contact through arrest and incarceration impact depression later in the life course and further considers how conditions of confinement impact depression after release. I found that certain conditions of confinement continue to impact depression after release and that arrest has a durable impact on depression over time. The third manuscript uses ordinary least squares regression to estimate the association between state-level incarceration and state-level mental health for the year 1993-2000. I found significant associations between poorer state-level mental health and the incarceration rate in each state for all years between 1993 and 2000. Taken together, these manuscripts expand upon previous literature and demonstrate the relationship between mental health and criminal justice contact at both the individual and structural levels.