Abstract
Objectives
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is differentially concentrated within incarcerated populations. Despite the consistency of this observation, the timing of within-individual changes in criminal justice contact in relation to TBI remains under-investigated. For example, previous studies have primarily considered TBI as a causal influence of later criminal justice contact. However, TBI may also serve as a consequence of criminal justice contact or a criminogenic lifestyle. The current study simultaneously observes both possibilities by examining criminal justice contact before, around the time of, and after the first reported TBI.
Methods
Drawing from a combination of self-report and lifetime official record data from a jail cohort admitted between February 2017 and September 2017 and who sustained their first reported TBI at age 21 or older (N = 531), the current study examines jail admissions in the 24 months before and 24 months after the first reported TBI and across eight biannual intervals (N = 4,248 person-periods).
Results
Any and misdemeanor admissions slightly increased pre-TBI and continued to increase around the time of and following TBI, never returning to pre-TBI levels. Felony admissions remained stable around the time of injury and increased post-TBI. Further analyses that incorporated a comparison group revealed that these patterns are unique to the TBI group and not a result of a larger systematic process.
Conclusions
These findings indicate that the probability of jail admission is greatest post-TBI, but also increases leading up to sustaining a TBI.
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Notes
We acknowledge that the term “criminal justice contact” may evoke a wide range of processes that include informal interactions with law enforcement, arrest, conviction, incarceration, and reentry to the community. The goal of the current study is not to examine all of these intricate and intertwined processes, as such an inquiry would move far outside of the research questions examined. Rather, the use of “criminal justice contact” within the context of the current study refers to the fact that the examined outcomes are measured using jail admissions, which are an, albeit imperfect, proxy for arrest but do not necessarily reflect conviction or incarceration. For this reason, we use this term in a narrower application than what may have been used in previous studies.
Importantly, it remains possible that TBI may still serve as a proximate cause of criminal justice contact in this scenario, but the ultimate cause would be attributed to internalized traits and influences. This possibility further underscores the bidirectional nature of these two hypotheses and demonstrates the importance of emphasizing their modularity in a causal framework.
Of the 4,713 individuals included in the examined cohort, 544 (or approximately 12%) reported a TBI before the age of 21.
As described in the main text, data were structured around the midpoint of the year in which the first TBI was reported, so the “24 month follow up period” does not necessarily refer to the 24 months that follow release from the offense that occurred during the recruitment period (February 21, 2017 and September 12, 2017). Rather, it refers to the 24 months that follow the midpoint of the year in which the first TBI was reported. Structuring the data in this way and the availability of lifetime admissions data allowed us to retain a much larger number of cohort members, increasing variability and statistical power and is also necessary to examine structured changes in admissions in relation to the timing of TBI.
The decision to employ biannual intervals was driven primarily by limited month-to-month variation in admissions (particularly for felony admissions). More specifically, only one study month displayed any admission prevalence that exceeded 5% (6 months post the mid-point of the year in which the first TBI was reported). This pattern was even more pronounced for felony admissions, in which only one study month displayed a prevalence that exceeded 3% (13 months post the midpoint of the year of the first reported TBI) and several months with a prevalence of less than 1%. For these reasons, we decided to pool the monthly intervals into biannual intervals.
These findings suggest that while the observed association appears to increase with age, a similar pattern was observed across all ages, suggesting that more generic aging processes are not responsible for the examined trajectories of jail admissions.
We are grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing out this possibility.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Amir Sarisalan, Jukka Savolainen, and Torbjørn Skardhamar for his helpful comments on previous drafts of this study, as well as Alex Kigerl for his assistance in preparing the examined data for analysis. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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Schwartz, J.A., Wright, E.M., Spohn, R. et al. Changes in Jail Admissions Before and After Traumatic Brain Injury. J Quant Criminol 38, 1033–1056 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-021-09524-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-021-09524-7