Modeling the relationship between the criminal justice and mental health systems

The last decade has witnessed a plethora of social control studies, ranging from imprisonment to psychiatric hospitalization. Unfortunately, research on each of these two forms tends to be isolated from the other, and researc h on the relationships between them is limited. In this article, the relati onship between the mental health and criminal justice systems is examined. The relationship is modeled in terms of the casual processes that underlie it: processes that are common to both systems, and processes that underlie the effect of one system on another. Using a panel of cities, the article r eveals strong cross-system effects and that racial composition strongly inf luences jail capacity. Through this effect, both jail and hospital admissio ns are influenced.