About the Project

This study uses qualitative research to examine how Black women in Georgia’s prisons experience and navigate mental health care –  revealing both the barriers and facilitators to culturally competent mental health support. Grounded in narrative identity theory and human rights frameworks, this work centers the human behind the statistic and positions incarceration as a core health equity issue, showing how structural power, stigma, and policy shape access to mental health care in carceral settings. By utilizing storytelling as data, this research portrays how mental health justice must include, and be accountable to, the lived realities of those the carceral system routinely overlooks.