PS440 Unit 9 Sociocultural and Legal Paper Example

A Deputy's Choice Between Jail and Us: A PS440 Unit 9 Sociocultural and Legal Influences Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS440: Psychopathology

Unit 9 Sociocultural and Legal Influences Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The crisis center, its guests and the officers are composite; the studies and review cited are real.

Two Guests, Two Paths

The crisis center where I work opened partly to give police and deputies somewhere to take people in a mental health crisis other than the county jail or the emergency room. Two guests show why that option matters and why it is not enough.

Corey, 23, whose first psychotic episode was described in earlier units, woke his street in the middle of the night accusing the people next door of stealing his thoughts. The responding deputy had completed crisis intervention training. Recognizing psychosis, she brought Corey to us rather than arresting him for disorderly conduct. He entered treatment within hours.

Darla, 48, has had schizophrenia since her twenties. Over the past six years she has been arrested eleven times, mostly for trespassing and disorderly conduct while homeless, and has spent a total of about fourteen months in jail. She stopped taking medication during several of those periods because jail health services changed her prescriptions. Our center first met her last spring, when an officer brought her in instead of booking her. By then she had lost her housing voucher, her disability benefits had lapsed during a jail stay, and she distrusted every institution she encountered.

The difference between Corey and Darla is not only in their illnesses. It reflects how legal, economic and cultural forces shape what happens to people with mental illness.

The Legal System

Steadman et al. (2009) assessed serious mental illness among people entering five jails in Maryland and New York. Close to 15 percent of the men screened, and almost twice that share of the women, were living with a serious mental illness when booked, such as schizophrenia spectrum disorders, bipolar disorder and major depression, far above rates in the community. The finding for women was particularly striking.

Darla's history is typical of what those numbers represent. Her arrests were for behaviors driven by untreated illness and homelessness. Each jail stay interrupted her medication, her benefits and her housing, making the next crisis more likely. The jail became, in effect, part of her mental health system, and a poor one.

For Darla, jail was not a break from the mental health system; for six years it was the part of the system she saw most often.

Crisis intervention training for officers and centers like ours are attempts to change that pattern. They depend on the judgment of individual officers, the availability of beds and agreements between agencies, which is why Corey and Darla had such different experiences.

Stigma

Link and Phelan (2001) proposed a model of stigma with several connected components. A difference is noticed and named; the name gets attached to unflattering beliefs; the named group is set apart as them rather than us; its members lose standing and are treated unfairly; and all of this depends on social, economic and political power held by those doing the labeling. The model treats stigma as a social process rather than only individual prejudice.

Each component appears in Darla's story. She was labeled not just as having schizophrenia but as a frequent flier at the jail, a term officers and staff used openly. The stereotype of people with schizophrenia as dangerous shaped how she was approached, often by several officers at once. Shelters turned her away after incidents, separating her from services. She lost housing and benefits, a direct loss of status and resources. Those making these decisions held power over her that she had no way to contest.

Corey's story shows stigma in a different form. His parents initially wanted to keep his diagnosis from relatives, and he worries that his former employer will not rehire him. Stigma can delay help even when the system works.

Economic Forces

Money shapes access at every step. Darla's disability benefits stopped while she was in jail, and restarting them took months, during which she had no income and no insurance. Crisis services, community treatment and housing support are often funded by short-term grants rather than stable reimbursement, which limits how many beds a center can staff. Insurance rules also matter: federal parity law requires many health plans to cover mental health care on terms comparable to medical care, but enforcement has been uneven, and people without coverage, like Darla during her gaps, fall outside its protection.

The economics of crisis care are also an argument for it. A night in our center costs less than a night in an emergency room and avoids the longer costs of jail stays, court time and repeated crises. Those savings, however, accrue to different agencies than the ones that pay for the center, which makes funding hard to sustain. The county pays for the jail, the hospital absorbs emergency room costs, and the center depends on a mix of state grants, local tax money and whatever insurance its guests happen to have. When a guest like Darla is uninsured, the center absorbs the cost, and the savings show up in someone else's budget. Several staff members described this as the most frustrating part of the work: knowing that the center prevents costs everyone else would pay, while worrying every year whether its own funding will be renewed.

Culture

Rapid City has a large Native American population, mostly Lakota, and Native residents are overrepresented among people arrested and jailed in the county. Gone and Trimble (2012) reviewed mental health among American Indian and Alaska Native people. They documented serious disparities in trauma, substance use and suicide, linked these to histories of colonization and ongoing social conditions, and emphasized diversity across tribal nations and debates about culturally grounded care.

For our center, that review has practical implications. Native guests may bring well-founded distrust of law enforcement and institutions, and staff who do not understand that history may misread it as resistance. The center has begun to partner with a local Native-led organization to offer cultural support and to recruit Native staff, steps that address both trust and access.

Conclusion

Corey and Darla had similar crises and very different paths. Steadman's data show how often people like Darla end up in jail, Link and Phelan's model shows the chain of stigma that pushed her there, economic forces explain why her care kept collapsing, and Gone and Trimble's review shows that culture and history shape trust in the whole system. A crisis center can change individual outcomes, but changing the pattern requires changing the laws, funding and attitudes around it.

References

Gone, J. P., & Trimble, J. E. (2012). American Indian and Alaska Native mental health: Diverse perspectives on enduring disparities. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 8, 131-160. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032511-143127

Link, B. G., & Phelan, J. C. (2001). Conceptualizing stigma. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 363-385. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.363

Steadman, H. J., Osher, F. C., Robbins, P. C., Case, B., & Samuels, S. (2009). Prevalence of serious mental illness among jail inmates. Psychiatric Services, 60(6), 761-765. https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2009.60.6.761