A new study highlights the overlapping problems faced by those in criminal court.
From July 2019 to May 2021, the Columbia Justice Lab developed and conducted a longitudinal interview study of 286 men and women facing new criminal charges in New York City. The Rikers Island Longitudinal Study (RILS) aimed to understand how defendants’ experiences in the pretrial process affected and were affected by their social and economic life conditions. To inform the City’s plan to close the Rikers Island Jail complex, the study sampled two groups of people identified by the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice as posing particular challenges for decarceration and diversion: individuals charged with violent felonies and those who were frequently incarcerated. Study participants were similar demographically to the general population of adults arrested in New York City. We interviewed each participant several times, sometimes in the community and sometimes at Rikers Island.
The study provides a picture of deep poverty in America’s wealthiest city — and the role that criminal courts play in the lives of some of New York City’s most disadvantaged residents. We find that people charged with crimes deal with serious and interconnected problems in the areas of housing, employment, health and substance use. We also find that arrest, jail detention and court conditions can have negative cascading consequences that feed back on one another, exacerbating social and economic instability.
Multidimensional poverty
Interviews with study participants revealed strong associations between mental health and substance use problems, unstable housing and employment, and exposure to violence (socioeconomic descriptives are in Table 1).
Close to a third of participants had both a mental health diagnosis and a past or current substance use problem, which often began as a coping strategy for their mental health issues. People with co-occurring substance use and mental health problems often face difficulties securing housing, and these difficulties are only compounded by having a criminal record and/or open criminal case. These co-occurring issues can, in turn, also be consequences of homelessness and housing instability.
The RILS data reveal a strong association between mental health challenges and housing instability. As Figure 1 indicates, participants who had drug and mental health problems were more than twice as likely than those with neither problem to report being unhoused, in a shelter or in other temporary housing.
In addition to the challenge of housing insecurity, people facing criminal charges also found it difficult to maintain employment while their cases were open and even after their cases were resolved. RILS participants were only loosely attached to the labor market, a marker of serious material hardship often involving reliance on family support and safety-net programs. Overall, 50% of respondents reported being unemployed at arraignment, an unemployment rate substantially greater than New York City’s 4.0% average in 2019.
Deficits in employment were associated with unstable housing and health problems. Only 25% of participants in temporary or unstable housing reported employment at arraignment, whereas about 60% of individuals in a private residence reported employment. At arraignment, participants with some kind of health issue had an employment rate of about 40% compared to about 60% for those in good health.
Several pathways connect health to employment. For example, chronic medical conditions may limit physical functioning needed for manual jobs. The most common job among RILS respondents was construction, physically demanding work that may be impossible for people with certain health conditions (67% of study participants reported a physical health diagnosis). Unaddressed mental health challenges like depression — affecting nearly 40% of respondents — may influence focus, motivation and decision-making and the ability to maintain a job.
For study participants who had jobs, employment was often unstable and insufficient. Of the participants who reported that they were employed at all four interview waves, only 41% reported working the same job across the entire study. And most participants employed at the first interview reported being paid in cash for at least some of their work, an indicator of exposure to precarious working conditions. Participants in poor health and unstable housing were particularly likely to be paid in cash.
Participants’ physical and mental health challenges — and their effects on employment — were likely aggravated by their relatively low rates of health insurance coverage. The 18% uninsurance rate of the RILS sample was over three times greater than New York State’s uninsurance rate of 5.2%. Emerging adults (aged 18 to 25), who reported the lowest employment rates at every interview, were particularly likely to be uninsured: 33% of them did not have any health insurance coverage compared to 13% of participants over age 25.
These findings suggest an important key to decarceration involves social policies that attend to individuals’ basic needs. Providing secure and supportive housing as well as increasing access to government benefits and health care promise to address many of the underlying issues driving people into criminal courts and jails without removing them from the community.
Life disruptions
Criminal legal system involvement can further destabilize people’s already precarious socioeconomic situations. Among study participants, being criminally prosecuted not only provoked discrete life disruptions, it also often triggered interconnected problems in participants’ housing, employment, mental health and family relationships. These problems fed back on one another such that, for example, losing work destabilized housing, which made it difficult to find new employment.
One-sixth of study participants reported losing housing due to court involvement (Figure 2). This was significantly more common among participants who reported having poor or fair overall mental health. Over 80% of participants stated that the court process negatively affected their mental health. Half of participants also reported missing a work shift due to court appearances, while a quarter reported losing their job entirely. Overall, 95% of participants reported that a court appearance interfered with some aspect of their lives, including employment, strains on family relationships and mental health.
For many participants, the consequences of being arrested and legally processed persisted even after cases were dismissed. This was particularly true for participants with conditions like probation or parole stemming from past arrests and convictions. Twenty-five-year-old Anika was arrested after a neighbor lied and said she had beat her up and stolen her credit cards. A judge sent her to Rikers because the arrest was a violation of her probation stemming from a previous conviction when she was 18 years old. She was released a week later on the condition that she attend a mental health program. As she was waiting for security camera footage to show her accuser was lying, the possibility of being sent to Rikers again loomed over her, exacerbating her existing health issues, including the long-term consequences of going into a coma when she was 20. Two weeks after her arrest, when we asked what the best part of her life was, Anika told us, “I don’t have [a best part of life] yet until this [case] get cleared away. These cases make me feel like just dying. I don’t be happy no more. I never thought I would be [back] on Rikers Island.” Anika dealt with the stress by harming herself; she once showed us scars on her arm from where she had repeatedly cut her skin.
Anika’s case was dismissed three months after her arraignment when the prosecutor reviewed the security footage. But even though the arrest that led to the probation violation was based on a lie, Anika’s probation violation case remained open and she still had to go through violation hearings and comply with additional conditions from the court. Three months after her case was dismissed, Anika sent us a text to let us know she had almost been sent to Rikers after a nonprofit social service agency sent a letter to the judge stating that Anika was not abiding by the new probation condition to attend weekly counseling there. The judge accepted her lawyer’s explanation that Anika was unaware of the new condition.
The RILS highlights the substantial social burden of a criminal court process that regularly results in dismissal, as in the case of Anika. The court process was widely experienced as disruptive to daily life, linked to stress, police avoidance, missed work and in some cases, job loss. Changes to prosecutorial, policing and community supervision policy that reduce arrests and their legal consequences (e.g., immediate probation violation proceedings) would appear important for minimizing the harmful effects of the criminal legal system. Furthermore, decreasing court-mandated programming and increasing funding for voluntary, community-based supports would reduce net-widening effects and likely increase the appeal of mental health treatment and other services.
Conclusion
The majority of the over 100,000 people who are arrested and prosecuted in New York City each year are likely contending with hardships related to poverty. Understanding their social and economic lives and the challenges they face can inform policy reforms for reducing jail populations and the footprint of the criminal legal system.
Interviews with RILS participants reveal that severe poverty makes people vulnerable to criminal legal system intervention, which, in turn, often deepens socioeconomic insecurity. Most of the arrests that led to their participation in the study were closely linked to poor social conditions and periods of increased stress and volatility related to mental health crises and substance use issues. Nonpunitive responses to these overlapping hardships that provide housing, health care and government benefits not only address people’s material needs but may well prevent system involvement and create stronger, safer communities.