EVALUATING THE QUALITY OF CORRECTIONAL MENTAL-HEALTH-SERVICES - AN APPROACH TO SURVEYING A CORRECTIONAL MENTAL-HEALTH SYSTEM

As part of a class action suit, the author was asked to assess the qua lity of mental health services in eight prisons in Georgia. This paper describes the background to the suit, reviews selected literature on assessing quality of correctional mental health care, and describes me thods used to survey prison mental health services. A standardized sur vey instrument was developed with probe questions to assess the qualit y of services, Individual cases were reviewed, inmates were interviewe d, and the quality of mental health structures, processes, and outcome s were assessed. Key findings from the survey are summarized. The auth or concluded that the quality of mental health services in the prisons surveyed was so low overall as to constitute a pattern of deliberate indifference, and that the services were constitutionally inadequate. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.