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Developing and Validating a Brief Jail Mental Health Screen in Maryland and New York, 2005-2006

Metadata Updated: November 14, 2025

The goal of this research project was to develop an efficient mental health screen that would aid in the early identification of severe mental illnesses and other acute psychiatric problems during the jail intake process. The researchers sought to validate the Brief Jail Mental Health Screen (BJMHS) as such a tool. Participants in the study included male and female jail detainees admitted to one of four county jails, two in Maryland and two in New York, from November 2005 to June 2006. A total of 10,562 jail detainees were screened using the BJMHS-R (Part 1). The screening data were used to identify a sub-sample of detainees who were systematically sampled for a detailed clinical assessment, the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID), which was conducted by a trained research interviewer in order to validate the screen. A subset of 464 jail detainees completed the SCID interviews (Part 2). Part 1, Tracking Data, contains 54 variables, including items and scores from the BJMHS-R, that were used to used to identify and generate a list of potential detainee participants for the SCID interview. Part 2, Interview Data, contains 326 variables, including items and scores from both the BJMHS-R and the SCID interviews, that were used to validate the screen.

Access & Use Information

Restricted: This dataset can only be accessed or used under certain conditions. License: us-pd

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date November 14, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOJ JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
Metadata Updated Date November 14, 2025
Publisher National Institute of Justice
Maintainer
Identifier 3870
Data First Published 2008-09-08T15:20:19
Language eng
Data Last Modified 2008-09-08T15:24:22
Rights These data are restricted due to the increased risk of violation of confidentiality of respondent and subject data.
Public Access Level restricted public
Bureau Code 011:21
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://www.justice.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id f87d412f-f30a-4a6b-8875-a6ec9444dcc5
Harvest Source Id 3290e90a-116f-42fc-86ac-e65521ef3b68
Harvest Source Title DOJ JSON
License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Program Code 011:060
Publisher Hierarchy Office of Justice Programs > National Institute of Justice
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 0d0ec0219539dca3c3e22802e94c36741df1e17c9d96295f62ee320ae48d53f1
Source Schema Version 1.1

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