The prevalence of mental health difficulties in a sample of prisoners in Trinidadian prisons referred for anger management

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the prevalence of mental health disorder symptoms in a sample of prisoners in Trinidadian prisons who volunteered to attend anger management groups.

A survey was conducted using the 90-item Symptom Check-List revised (SCL-90-R) which was administered to prisoners in groups within the prison system. In total 132 prisoners (about 9 per cent of the prison population) completed the measure. The effect sizes of prisoners’ similarities to a psychiatric inpatient group and their differences from a non-patient group were used to identify symptoms most indicative of pathology in these prisoners.

The results on the SCL-90-R indicate that this group of prisoners (77.3 per cent male) had scores of psychiatric symptomatology that were much closer to a psychiatric inpatient population rather than to a general community population.

These results suggest there may be unmet psychiatric need among the population served by the prison services in Trinidad. It is not known how this sample differs from the general prison population. However, the unmet psychiatric need in this specific population suggests that a greater mental health focus in health services within prisons is to be considered to meet these needs.

These data suggest that there are significant mental health issues for some prisoners in Trinidad and possibly more generally in similar prison systems within the Caribbean and this may have significant implications for the treatment of prisoners and the delivery of mental health services in these prisons.