Pre-sentence mental health service use predicts post-sentence mortality in a population cohort of first-time adult offenders

Abstract

Mortality risk in the 2 years following sentence completion is associated with pre-sentence health service use and a range of socio-demographic factors for both incarcerated and non-custodial offenders. The opportunity afforded by imprisonment could be exploited by provision of funding to identify and treat mental illness, impart preventive health education addressing modifiable risk factors and provide transitional care to community-based services, all of which may help reduce preventable post-sentence deaths. Diversion to non-custodial sentences is also a plausible option.

Latent classes in diagnoses among psychiatric inpatients predicting mortality and imprisonment – a nationwide cohort study

“…It is a limitation of the study that the data included no information about socioeconomic factors or information about early life situation, upbringing, family relations or criminality in the family. These are known predictors of mortality in criminals [3] and criminality and outcomes in psychiatric patients [2]. Other weaknesses of the study relate to risk misclassification.…”

The Mortality After Release from Incarceration Consortium (MARIC): Protocol for a multi-national, individual participant data meta-analysis

“…Third, the Consortium includes cohorts with a degree of heterogeneity and this is likely to have impacted the observed mortality estimates. For example, participants in several cohorts all have as inclusion criteria a history of opioid dependence [22,24,47] and/or a diagnosis of HIV [28,47,48], contributing to an increased risk of mortality. The impact of this cohort heterogeneity will be explored by conducting sensitivity analyses which exclude selected cohorts.…”

Pre- and post-sentence mental health service use by a population cohort of older offenders (≥45 years) in Western Australia

“…Furthermore, we recently identified poor post-sentence health outcomes associated with age and low pre-sentence MHS use whereby, older first-time offenders (≥45 years) without pre-sentence MHS contact had a significantly elevated risk of natural death within 2 years of sentence completion than younger offenders (13). Therefore, information on pre-sentence MHS use and predictors of post-sentence MHS are vital for informing service provision and improvements for this group of first-time older offenders.…”