Women’s Prison Psychology

Annika Fisher-Eddy (she/they)

Editorial Team Member

Please note brief references to suicide and murder.

I know this might make me sound insane, but lately I’ve been increasingly fascinated in looking into true crime cases, specifically ones involving young, female murderers. I’ve been looking at criminal cases such as the case of Taylor Parker, one of only seven women who is currently sitting on death row in Texas after killing her best friend and stealing her unborn baby. I’ve also been looking at Mackenzie Shirilla, a 17-year-old girl who was sentenced to life in prison after murdering her boyfriend and his best friend by intentionally crashing her car while they were passengers. I’ve always liked hearing true crime stories, and when I took a forensic science class in school last year, I loved watching the documentaries about murder cases. 

But what I enjoy specifically about true crime is looking into the facts of the criminal cases and comparing them to diagnostic criteria for various mental health disorders. I like figuring out what mental health disorder the criminal may have had that could have contributed to their actions.

For a while now, I’ve known that I want to major in psychology in college. As someone who struggles with mental health, not only have I always enjoyed researching my own symptoms and experiences, I also like researching other people’s symptoms and mental disorders. I want to help other people similar to me get the help they need. 

But now that I’ve started looking into these true crime cases, I’ve realized just how interesting criminals are, not only in the ways they plan and execute their crimes, but the ways their minds work. I’ve been looking into the differences in the actual chemistry and physicality of psychopaths’ brains. It’s really interesting looking at a picture of a normal brain compared with the brain of a psychopath.

The reason I’m fascinated in women’s cases specifically is because women are much less likely than men to commit violent crimes, hence there being only seven women currently on Texas’ death row. Because of this, it seems like severe mental health conditions such as psychosis, schizophrenia, and drug abuse disorders tend to get overlooked in women. There are stereotypes that these disorders can only be seen in men, but that’s just because men are the population that are more likely to be assessed and diagnosed with those disorders. 

A lot of mental and neurological disorders present differently in men than women, including the much more common and less severe disorders like ADHD and autism. The diagnostic criteria for many of these kinds of disorders fit more with the male presentation of these disorders, so when women have these disorders and their symptoms don’t match the male presentation, they are less likely to be diagnosed. This is why I want to strive to help more women get diagnosed with mental disorders so they can get the treatment they need, which they deserve as much as men. 

And I want to work with prisoners because in general, the mental health of prisoners gets overlooked. There have been many cases of people committing suicide while in prison because they become depressed, which is especially likely if they already have underlying mental health issues. 

Because prisoners are people who have broken the law, people have a bias against them and don’t realize that a lot of their actions could have been caused by underlying mental health conditions that they haven’t gotten treated. It’s possible that a lot of crime could be prevented if more people were able to get treatment for their mental health. 

This is why criminals in prison deserve to get treatment for their mental health just as much as everyone else does. I’ve always thought locking people up isn’t the best solution to keep people from breaking the law. The best way to prevent it is by giving criminals mental health treatment and rather than being locked up in prison, they should be put in a rehabilitation facility or a similar place to get the help they need to prevent them from doing the same thing again. It’s much more likely that if someone gets the treatment they need, they won’t commit a crime again and end up back in prison after being released.

Another thing that often gets overlooked in female criminal cases is that a lot of them had to break the law in order to escape domestic abuse. I recently saw an article in a magazine about women who are in prison after murdering their abusive husbands, and honestly there are some times when I think murder is justifiable and I think someone abusing you is a logical reason to kill them. I want to help those women find support and feel more safe.

Speaking of sexual abuse, not only do I think female prisoners need better mental health care in prison, I also feel more comfortable working exclusively with female prisoners because as a woman myself, I would much more likely to be sexually assaulted or something along those lines if I worked with men, especially men in prison because they might have underlying mental health conditions that could make them even more likely to sexually assault someone than a man who is not in prison.

These are the reasons why I’m hoping to one day become a psychologist in a women’s prison. It’s a goal for pretty far in the future, because the first step is getting a psychology degree. But we’ll see where this goal takes me!