By Bethany Growns, Jeff Kukucka, Richard Moorhead, Rebecca K. Helm

Background: Wrongful criminal conviction can signifi-cantly impair the mental health of exonerees. However, much less is known about wrongful accusation: the impact of wrongful legal allegations or investigations—absent con-viction—on mental health outcomes.Method: To address this gap, we surveyed 101 victims of the Post Office Scandal in the United Kingdom who were wrongly accused, convicted and/or investigated for finan-cial ‘losses’ that were actually caused by software errors.

Results: Most respondents reported clinically significant post-traumatic stress (67%) and depressive (60%) symptoms—irrespective of the outcome of their case. These results suggest that both wrongful accusation and wrongful conviction can significantly impair mental health.

Conclusion: Our findings have important implications for victims of the Post Office Scandal and highlight the unique needs of people impacted by flawed convictions and flawed legal accusations. Our findings underscore the need to pro-vide exonerees with holistic postrelease support and demon-strate that this support should also be extended to victims of wrongful accusation.

Legal and Criminological Psychology Volume 29, Issue 1 Feb 2024

By Dan Brown and Elisabetta De Cao

Child maltreatment is pervasive, often undetected, and harmful. We investigate whether it is impacted by unemployment by leveraging unique administrative data including all reported cases of child abuse and neglect in the United States from 2004 to 2012. Using an industry shift-share instrument to identify county-level unemployment effects, we find a substantial rise in neglect. The likely channel is lower quality-time spent with children rather than decreased financial investments. Expenditures on children remain stable during recessions. Instead, higher local-area unemployment rate reduces parental childcare time, worsens mental health, and contributes to an increase in one-parent households.

IZA DP No. 16799 Bonn, Germany: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics , 2024. 66p.

By Jacob Bor, Atheendar S Venkataramani, David R Williams, Alexander C Tsai

Background Police kill more than 300 black Americans—at least a quarter of them unarmed—each year in the USA. These events might have spillover effects on the mental health of people not directly affected. Methods In this population-based, quasi-experimental study, we combined novel data on police killings with individual-level data from the nationally representative 2013–15 US Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to estimate the causal impact of police killings of unarmed black Americans on self-reported mental health of other black American adults in the US general population. The primary exposure was the number of police killings of unarmed black Americans occurring in the 3 months prior to the BRFSS interview within the same state. The primary outcome was the number of days in the previous month in which the respondent’s mental health was reported as “not good”. We estimated difference-in-differences regression models—adjusting for state-month, monthyear, and interview-day fixed effects, as well as age, sex, and educational attainment. We additionally assessed the timing of effects, the specificity of the effects to black Americans, and the robustness of our findings. Findings 38 993 (weighted sample share 49%) of 103710 black American respondents were exposed to one or more police killings of unarmed black Americans in their state of residence in the 3 months prior to the survey. Each additional police killing of an unarmed black American was associated with 0·14 additional poor mental health days (95% CI 0·07–0·22; p=0·00047) among black American respondents. The largest effects on mental health occurred in the 1–2 months after exposure, with no significant effects estimated for respondents interviewed before police killings (falsification test). Mental health impacts were not observed among white respondents and resulted only from police killings of unarmed black Americans (not unarmed white Americans or armed black Americans). Interpretation Police killings of unarmed black Americans have adverse effects on mental health among black American adults in the general population. Programmes should be implemented to decrease the frequency of police killings and to mitigate adverse mental health effects within communities when such killings do occur.

Lancet 2018; 392: 302–10