Untangling the relationship between mental illness and crime

From MinnPost

After graduating from Grinnell College in 2003 with a degree in sociology, Jillian Peterson went right into the heart of the beast: She took a job as an investigator for the Capital Defender Office in New York City with the task of documenting the bio-psycho-social histories of men facing the death penalty.

The St. Paul native and Central High School alum said she was expecting “to meet Hannibal Lecter types, to be afraid, to feel threatened,” she said. “And I didn’t.”

Instead, she said, she began to see the humanity in these “very immature, very young” offenders who were “products of the lives they had led. And there was always mental illness, often a laundry list of diagnoses if you went way back.”

Peterson, who got her Ph.D. in psychology and social behavior at the University of California Irvine and now teaches at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, spent the next decade seeking to more deeply understand the relationship (if any) between mental illness and criminal behavior...

...read the rest of the article here.

& find the full study here.