Prison, Mental Health and Family Spillovers

Manudeep Bhuller, Laura Khoury and Katrine Løken

No 19/2021, Discussion Paper Series in Economics from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics

Abstract: Does prison cause mental health problems among inmates and their family members? Correlational evidence reveals that the prevalence of mental health problems is much higher among inmates than among the general population, but remains silent on the issue of causality. We exploit the strengths of the Norwegian setting and the richness of the data available to measure the impacts of incarceration on the health of defendants and their family members. We first use an event study design around the case decision event. We complement this with an instrumental variable strategy that takes advantage of the random assignment of criminal cases to judges differing in their stringency. Both methods consistently show that the positive correlation is misleading: incarceration in fact lowers the prevalence of mental health disorders among defendants as measured by mental health-related visits to health-care professionals. We further demonstrate that this effect lasts long after release and is unlikely driven by a shift in health-care demand holding health status constant. Family members, especially spouses, also experience positive spillovers on their mental health.

Keywords: mental health; incarceration; family spillovers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I18 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2021-11-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/11250/2831130 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Prison, Mental Health, and Family Spillovers (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2021_019

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series in Economics from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics NHH, Department of Economics, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Synne Stormoen ().