Breaking Barriers: Dr. Linda Teplin's Mission to Understand the Outcomes of Incarcerated Youth
July 9, 2024 By: Divya Bhardwaj
Linda Teplin, Director of the Health Disparities and Public Policy Program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said people often have misconceptions about the incarcerated populations she studies.
“Often, when I go to cocktail parties, people say, ‘Oh, you study bad people,’” she said. “I say, ‘No, I study poor people,’ because people with funds don't go to jail or prison by and large. When you walk into a jail or prison, you are overwhelmed by the predominance of people in poverty and especially of people who are minorities who are disproportionately poor.”
Teplin first studied police-referred psychiatric emergency patients, which led her to investigate the criminalization of mentally ill people — whether they were being arrested instead of treated. She went on to evaluate the prevalence of and treatment for men and women with mental disorders in detention, and after noticing that many participants first got into legal trouble in their youth, she launched the Northwestern Juvenile Project in 1995, the first longitudinal study of mental health needs and outcomes of juvenile detainees.
Today, Teplin and her team are immersed in the Next Generation project, studying the children of the nearly 2000 originally sampled 10- to 18-year-olds (now 39- to 49-year-olds) to examine intergenerational patterns. She is also set to receive an R01 grant from the National Institute of Aging to extend the Northwestern Juvenile Project and investigate how dose of incarceration affects overall health, age-related conditions, and risk factors for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.
Teplin’s work has been published in major journals, including the American Journal of Psychiatry, JAMA Pediatrics, and the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Her findings have affected national public policy, and most recently, her research on crime victimization in adults with severe mental illness was cited in the U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Firearm Violence issued on June 25.
She also served as senior author on a recently published study using data from the Northwestern Juvenile Project that found most youths in the justice system with a mental health disorder did not receive needed services in the 16 years after detention.
The Northwestern Juvenile Project’s longitudinal structure, with its large, diverse sample that has been interviewed up to 13 times over nearly three decades, lends itself to numerous studies that leverage the cognitive, physical, and mental health data collected since participants’ adolescence.
“If you want to look at the persistence of relationships, the persistence of problems, the consequences of early behaviors on later behaviors — then you have to do longitudinal studies,” Teplin said.
Now that the adolescents first recruited for the Northwestern Juvenile Project are mainly in their forties, Teplin and her team study their children as well. The Next Generation project focuses on how parents’ incarceration affects children and tackles questions about intergenerational patterns of drug abuse and firearm violence.
As for the originally sampled participants, Teplin is preparing to launch a study that will be “the first comprehensive longitudinal investigation of the dose of incarceration, from adolescence into middle adulthood, as a social pathway for ADRD and other age-related conditions,” according to the Specific Aims of her upcoming National Institute on Aging grant. The anticipated start date is September 1, 2024.
The Northwestern Juvenile Project’s detailed longitudinal data provides a new opportunity to investigate the effects of dose of incarceration, which includes how often and for how long people were in detention, their ages, the recency of their stays, and whether they were in a juvenile facility, jail, or prison.
As she dives into the next phases of her research, Teplin said she focuses on gradual and steady progress.
“How do you do these large-scale research projects? You take it one step at a time,” she said. “It's just a matter of working hard and persevering.”