Screening for Co-Occurring Mental and Substance Use Disorders in Minority Offenders

Understanding the presence of co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders (COD) is essential to improve the effectiveness offender treatment programs. The Criminal Justice Co-Occurring Disorders Screening Instrument (CJ-CODSI) is designed to develop a brief, validated COD screening instrument for criminal justice system use. The investigative team constructed a screening battery composed of the Mental Health Screening Form III (Carroll & McGinley, 2001); the Global Appraisal of Individual Needs Short Screener (Dennis, 1998); and the MINI-International Neuropsychiatric Interview (Sheehan et al., 1998). The criterion measure was the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV. Preliminary analysis (validated sample n=223) indicates that six items drawn from these instruments are highly effective in screening for the presence of mental disorder among inmates in substance abuse treatment programs (overall accuracy 72.6%; sensitivity 78.8%, specificity 47.7%). The minority supplement to CJ-CODSI is designed to examine the effectiveness of the CJ-CODSI screening battery for mental disorders among minority offenders in prison-based substance abuse treatment. Preliminary data of African-Americans (n=55) and Latinos (n=105), in the parent study, will be compared to the larger sample of non-ethnic minority offenders in the same age group (n=143). In addition, the investigator will discuss the design and methodology employed in gathering data from a larger sample (n=100) of minority offenders. This study has the potential to determine if the promising results on the utility of the CJ-CODSI for screening are applicable to minority offenders, or what modifications are needed, and thereby create a screening instrument that can be used with this group.