This project will rigorously evaluate the effects of Minnesota's School-Linked Mental Health program on academic outcomes, mental health services outcomes, and juvenile justice outcomes, for children and adolescents. This program has expanded progressively across Minneapolis, Hennepin County, and more recently the state, as a way to reduce barriers to identifying and treating mental health problems in school-age youth. We will take advantage of the staggered implementation of school-linked mental health services across schools between 2004-2016 to estimate difference-in-differences models that will isolate the causal effect of the program on the outcomes we have identified. We will use…

Over the past three decades, the number of women incarcerated in the United States has increased more than 600%. Today, nearly 219,000 women are incarcerated, approximately 6% of whom are pregnant upon their admission to prison. Children born to incarcerated women are known to be at increased risk for health problems. These children may be the most vulnerable in the nation, and yet they are among the least understood. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study seeks to characterize the health status and health care access of children born to incarcerated women, and to identify barriers to accessing care. Building on our partnerships with the Minnesota Prison Doula Project and the…

In recent years, policing has become an increasingly controversial and salient government service in the US. After several heavily publicized deaths of Black boys and men (and, later, Black women) during police encounters, some have rallied around the #BlackLivesMatter movement, while others have grown stauncher in their support for law enforcement. Yet scholars currently know little about this shift in the politics of policing. This study takes a mixed-methods approach, combining survey data, ethnographic observations, textual analysis, and qualitative interviews to understand police reform in Minneapolis, a city on the forefront of national progressive reforms, yet with a deeply…