Coping with the "pains of imprisonment": the interaction of institutional conditions and individual experiences on inmate mental health

The United States prison system has seen high rates of poor mental health throughout the last several decades. Research on the mental health outcomes of incarcerated populations has largely been organized around either an importation or deprivation theoretical model, with few studies integrating the two models. In this study, I use national data on 7,043 inmates nested within 274 prisons to consider how prison characteristics moderate the relationship between individual-level factors and depressive symptoms. Results from hierarchical linear models indicate that the relationships between individual histories of physical and sexual abuse and depressive symptoms depend on the level of overcrowding in the prison. This provides one of the first tests of an integrated importation/deprivation model for inmate mental health that goes beyond accounts of inmate suicide and provides an important foundation for future studies of inmate mental health that use an integrated importation/deprivation model.