Behind the Data: Mental Health and the Justice System in Durham County
Faculty team Maria Tackett and Nicole Schramm-Sapyta's seven-year project is transforming our understanding and responses to the needs of people navigating Durham’s criminal justice and healthcare systems.
Working with student researchers and in collaboration with the Durham County Detention Facility, Justice Services Center, and Duke Health, they’ve compiled one of the most comprehensive datasets of its kind, covering over 23,000 individuals with mental health diagnoses who were locally incarcerated between 2014 and 2023. This year, the project has expanded to include personal interviews and focus groups centering the voices of those who have experienced incarceration while managing mental illness or substance use disorders. The goal? Better interventions, support for smart policy decisions, and stronger partnership between health and criminal justice systems in Durham and beyond.
“My team and I partnered with Dr. Schramm-Sapyta and the Data+ team almost 10 years ago, and it was one of the best experiences and community partnerships. Our collaboration has opened many doors of opportunities to other County and City partnerships — from analyzing the 911 call data to understanding mental health call trends, to how the cash bond has affected people being able to get connected to care in the detention facility.”
Laylon Williams, Criminal Justice Specialist and Crisis Intervention Team Coordinator, City of Durham
Full Transcript
Welcome to season two of Duets, a Duke Trinity podcast that explores research collaborations between faculty, students and community partners across Durham and North Carolina.
Today we’re joined by Maria Tackett and Nicole Schramm-Sapyta, a faculty team whose seven-year project is transforming our understanding and responses to the needs of people navigating Durham’s criminal justice and healthcare systems. Working with student researchers and in collaboration with the Durham County Detention Facility, Justice Services Center, and Duke Health, they’ve compiled one of the most comprehensive datasets of its kind, covering over 23,000 individuals with mental health diagnoses who were locally incarcerated between 2014 and 2023. This year, the project has expanded to include personal interviews and focus groups centering the voices of those who have experienced incarceration while managing mental illness or substance use disorders. The goal? Better interventions, support for smart policy decisions, and stronger partnership between health and criminal justice systems in Durham and beyond.
Maria: Hi, my name is Maria Tackett. I'm an assistant professor of the practice in Statistical Science. Most of my work focuses on statistics pedagogy and thinking about the undergraduate experience, and particularly introductory math and statistics courses, but I'm also interested in social science applications of statistics.
Nicole: I am Nicole Schramm-Sapyta. I am one of the associate directors and also an associate professor of the practice at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. I'm interested in the intersection of mental health in the criminal justice system and just how we can use the knowledge of neuroscience to alleviate stigma and help make the world a better place.
Maria: Nicole, can you share a time when this research made you feel hopeful?
Nicole: A lot, how many do you want to know? So, the times when our data has been useful to our community partners, just sitting in a meeting and going "Oh, Maria had this idea for a map. And do you guys want to see our map?,” and the community partners are like, “yeah, we need to know the neighborhoods in Durham where the most arrests are coming from.” “Here you go.” And it's just things that came out of creativity, from our students and from you and me, and other people cared about it too. That brings me the most hope.
What about you? What makes you hopeful for our work?
Maria: So, when we led our first team together, that was in summer 2020, so the start of the pandemic, but also the big protests and racial uproar and reckoning in response to George Floyd. And I just remember there being so much tension or like unspent energy, and doing the book club, we were starting to think about the criminal justice system — and particularly people kind of going in and out of the system and getting trapped in the system –– but just having those conversations with students, with all of the political stuff happening in the background. What gave me hope was, one: there was a productive outlet for all of that energy, and our conversations as a team were just way more productive and sort of forward-looking and more thoughtful than, maybe, some of the stuff that was happening on social media and in the ether. And so those conversations that summer just gave me hope. And two: that there are young people thinking about these problems.
Nicole: Absolutely, 100% yes.
How is collaboration important for our work?
Maria: Collaboration is really important, I think, one because we both bring a different expertise to the table, and we need both sides of the expertise in order to make this work happen. So, my side is the statistics side, and so I'm very well versed in how to think about the data, and you know, what model to use or how to clean the data. But you really bring on that community piece, that knowledge and expertise about, like, mental health and thinking about severe mental illness in a careful way. And so really, with our collaboration, it's like, I can get us to the analysis, but then you have that expertise and experience that really brings the, like, the “so what? What is the meaning behind all of this?” And really, without both of those pieces, the project would be missing a big, a big half.
Nicole: Yeah, I completely agree with that because there are times when, oh, I want to solve the problems of the world, and I want to understand, you know, all the factors that are driving reincarceration. And you'll say: “yes, but in our data, the only ones we can analyze are these three.” And cool, that's great, like we can be realistic about what we can do and can't do. We've got this messy, real-world dataset, but there's a lot of potential there.
The other piece that I love that you bring in is just the practical realities of how to bring students from that same place, from these big ideas — they all want to save the world, just like we do — but you got to start with cleaning the data. You got to start with descriptive statistics, and then they learn, and then they grow.
Maria: Yes, I agree, and because we've been together so long, we've seen students grow up through our team. And so just being able to see students start, like their sophomore year, and then, you know, like, see them do a senior thesis project where they're driving the research, they're asking the questions, they're doing really independent, thoughtful work, and so that's been a really rewarding part of being part of this for so long, as now we're seeing students sort of grow up through the team.
Nicole: So Maria, I'd love to get your perspective on how we use our tools, especially your expertise in statistics, to confront like real-world challenges, because there are a lot right now.
Maria: I'll consider this a tool: it’s the ability to tell stories about data and statistics. And so, I think it's very apparent in our world, like you can have all the data, all the facts, but, like, if you can't convey that in a compelling way that connects with people where they are, then the facts and data and all the fancy statistics just don't matter. And so, I think being able to tell stories and communicate is one of the most important tools.
Nicole: And what I love about what I've learned from you with statistics is that it's a way to take the truth and make it accessible and understandable. Because, yeah, we can we can manipulate numbers a hundred different ways, but it matters what question you asked and how you honestly use the right subset of tools from the statistics toolbox to work on this particular set of data, and this particular question.
Maria: Yes, and you know, really, this makes me think of the focus group aspect of our work, where, with all of the like, we have really rich data, and all the data and things that we have, there's a stopping point to how much story you can really tell. And so, bringing in the actual like human aspect, like you're talking to people, you're getting their personal stories. It's maybe sometimes a bit like "oh no,” for a statistician, but sometimes the story of one person is way more compelling than any of the statistics I can do with data from thousands and thousands of people. And so being able to make those connections and really convey how the statistics relate to this one person’s story that's really going to move the message.
Nicole: And I'm starting to see the benefit of both of those. Like, you know, X percentage of people in the jail have a mental health issue. Well, here's one, and here are the programs that helped her. Like, we can specifically say this is a real problem, this one person's not an anecdote, this person is part of a trend. And so, like, the both of them together, I think, are really powerful.
And the cool thing is that a lot of that has come from the trust that we've built with our community partners over and over. Like, they trusted us enough to share the data of programs that people were getting while they were in the jail. They've trusted us to ask the question about, how has cash bail reform changed the outcomes of our population? And so, yeah, just that intersection of having more trust to be able to do more sophisticated questions. I just love that we've been together long enough to do that.
Maria: I guess maybe then back to you. So what are some important tools that you use to confront challenges in the current moment?
Nicole: I keep finding over and over that understanding the brain removes stigma. I study drug addiction, and there's so much stigma around drug addiction, but when I can say: here's what's happening in the brain, here's how the dopamine system has changed, here's how someone's brain might have been more vulnerable to the drug before they ever took it, through no fault of their own, people go, "oh, okay, well, how can I help that person?”. And if you know someone in your life who suffers with addiction, and you get a little bit more understanding, you say, "okay, that explains the frustrations I've had with this illness, and helps me to help this person, helps me to have a little bit more patience with this person.” And so, I keep coming back to just understanding how the brain works is what really gives us a foundation to honestly deal with some issues that are pretty stigmatized.
Maria: Is there a way that teaching at Duke has been different than how you imagined it would be?
Nicole: Yeah, when I was a high-schooler, I interviewed at Duke. I was like, applying for scholarships, I was little valedictorian of my class, and I thought everybody loved me. And I came to Duke, and the admissions officer was really cold to me. And I was like, I'm never going to that school. And then, fast forward, I guess, 15 years later, and I came here as a postdoc, and there was research that I wanted to do and Duke had a place for me to be interdisciplinary. And that has been amazing. And so, I guess going from my preconceptions way back as a high schooler of Duke as this elite, exclusive place, to find that it's really this welcoming, supportive place. I meet professors like you all the time who put students first and really care about the student experience, and then we find these amazing students who want to give back. So yeah, that is not a surprise anymore, but compared to my high school self, that was a really big surprise.
What about you? How did Duke surprise you?
Maria: I went to undergrad at a big state school. I got some of my early teaching experience during my PhD at a big state school. And so, really, the interaction between professors and students was very formal, like it was either just like during your classes or you had your advising meetings, and so when I came here and there were things like FLUNCH I was very, like a little confused — like, oh, we're just going to go eat lunch? Okay. But that's actually been, like, one of my favorite things about being at Duke. Like, getting to know the students outside of just like their statistics coursework, or like our project. The students are very open, and so it's just been so, I think, fun and surprising at first to get to know students as whole people as opposed to just, "oh, you're a student in my class and I'm assessing your knowledge of statistics.” And so yeah, that interaction and community feel between the faculty and students has been a nice, pleasant surprise, and something I was not expecting.
Nicole: Yeah, yeah, I love that too.
Maria: You can find out more about our team and our research on the Data+ and Bass Connections websites we’re the Mental Health and the Justice System Durham County team. You can also find out more about the work that I'm doing in Statistics Education and the courses that I'm teaching on my DukeScholars page, Maria Tackett.
Nicole: And you can find more about my research and the work I do in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences on my DukeScholars page, Nicole Schramm-Sapyta.
Duets is produced by Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.
Senior Editor and Producer: Cara August, Trinity Communications
Audio Editor and Mixer: Marc Maximov
Music Composition: André Mego, T’20 | MMS ‘21
Production Sponsor: Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Duke University
Recording Date and Location: April 2025, Bryan Center Studios
