TY - JOUR AU - Chatterji,Pinka AU - Cuellar,Alison TI - How Do Youth with Mental Disorders Fare in the Juvenile Justice System? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 12437 PY - 2006 Y2 - August 2006 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12437 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12437.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Pinka Chatterji State University of New York at Albany Economics Department 1400 Washington Avenue Albany, NY 12222 Tel: 518/442-4746 E-Mail: pchatterji@albany.edu Alison Evans Cuellar Department of Health Administration and Policy George Mason University 4400 University Drive, MS 1J3 Fairfax, VA 22030 Tel: 703/993-5048 E-Mail: aevanscu@gmu.edu AB - The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between mental health problems and justice outcomes. Several studies have documented that individuals with a variety of mental disorders are overrepresented in the justice system. This pattern could result if persons with mental disorders are more likely to commit crimes, or more likely to commit serious crimes, than persons without disorders. In addition, individuals with mental disorders may be more likely than those without disorders to be sanctioned conditional on committing a particular crime. The major public policy concern is around the latter possibility, which has been interpreted as the justice system being biased against those with mental disorders. In this paper we explore several channels through which mental health problems, measured as ADHD and depression, may lead to over-representation in the criminal justice system. Using a large sample of adolescents, our findings show that youth with ADHD fare worse in the juvenile justice system in terms of the probability of being arrested and the probability of conviction once arrested. We find that elevated ADHD symptoms during adolescence are associated with statistically significant and meaningful increases in the probability of arrest and conviction after controlling for preexisting factors and mechanisms that may arise from the disorder itself. ER -