Deathworthy: A Mental Health Perspective of The Death Penalty
To highlight the unique psychological distress experienced by prisoners on death row, by interrogating how the carceral ecology surrounding death row prisoners, produce and exacerbate psychological disability.
Process
The report presents the findings of the Mental Health Research Project which was conceptualised to undertake an exploration into (a) psychiatric concerns among death row prisoners, (b) intellectual disability among prisoners sentenced to death, and (c) the psychological consequences of being on death row.
This Report is a culmination of close to five years of work when our team operating as Project 39A, including legal researchers, mental health professionals and students of law, psychology, psychiatry and social work. We interviewed 88 death row prisoners across five states, and 110 families across seven states. The aims of the Project afford themselves to quantitative as well as qualitative methods of analysing the data. Given the nature of information collected, which is largely centred on the subjective experience of prisoners and families, a mixed methods approach was adopted.
