ArticleFrontiers in public health2026
Community mental health under routine detention: jail reliance, pretrial custody, and frequent mental distress.
Article in Frontiers in public health, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Introduction: Most evidence on the criminal legal system as a structural determinant of population mental health concerns police killings and prison incarceration rather than the local jails and pretrial custody through which most criminal-legal contact occurs. We examined whether U.S. counties that rely more heavily on jail confinement and pretrial custody have a higher prevalence of frequent mental distress. Methods: We linked county-year frequent mental distress estimates from CDC PLACES (2018-2023) to jail population, pretrial custody, and jail admissions rates from the Vera Institute, law-enforcement incident rates from the FBI Crime Data Explorer, fatal police shooting rates from the Washington Post, and state-level jail mortality rates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Ecological associations were estimated with population-weighted least squares models with state and year fixed effects, county-clustered standard errors, and analysis windows matched to each source's coverage. Results: A one-standard-deviation higher jail population rate was associated with 1.17 percentage points higher frequent mental distress (95% CI 0.88 to 1.46; Discussion: Counties that rely heavily on jail and pretrial detention carry a substantially higher community mental-health burden, but that burden is largely inseparable from the socioeconomic disadvantage of the same counties; routine detention practice is best treated as a marker of structurally disadvantaged community environments rather than as an isolated exposure.
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