Potential Interventions for Policy Support Targeting Justice-involved People with Mental Illness

Many people hold the misconception that people with mental illness are dangerous and, consequently, should be feared. This stigma is reinforced by the overrepresentation of people with mental illness in the U.S. criminal legal system. This overrepresentation is due to ineffective policies making it difficult to adequately identify and treat this population within the legal system. To address this, two studies were conducted on CloudResearch. The first study examined public attitudes towards correctional policies and explored associated attitudinal factors. The second study built on these findings by testing interventions to decrease stigma and increase support for rehabilitation. Findings show that participants were more supportive of rehabilitative policies compared to punitive policies aimed at justice-involved people with mental illness. Participants’ fear of people with mental illness, fear of criminal behavior, perceived mutability of mental illness, and perceived mutability of criminal behavior were examined in relation to support for both punitive and rehabilitative policy. Imagined contact did not effectively increase support for rehabilitative policy, but education did. Future research can build on these findings by improving the interventions and identifying other attitudinal factors that could be paths for intervention.