Dolores Rojas, a researcher at Harvard who has studied the effects of mass incarceration on African American men. “The question that everyone asks,” she says, “is what exactly is the relationship between mass incarceration and mental health?” She recently started her own investigation into that question, and found that while one part of the answer is pretty easy to understand – most people experience more mental illness after prison, and the people in prison tend to feel more vulnerable to it – the other part, involving the experiences surrounding the arrests and sentences themselves, can be far trickier. What is the impact of mass incarceration on the communities whose members are arrested and incarcerated? How do police react when encountering mentally ill people? And how do police respond when they meet a person and notice that they’re in distress? What does it mean when you’re in the public eye and you face a person who has been arrested for an assault? How are police supposed to act when they don’t know who the person is before they’ve even been arrested?

We met in a coffee shop in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. The afternoon light was seeping in through window blinds and I felt the chill of the morning air as the conversation began. “How would you feel right now if you found out a stranger was pointing a gun at your head?” Rojas asked me. I’d been at work for hours when, one after another, my phone rang. My husband, who was at the bar in San Francisco listening to the Jazz at Lincoln Center performances that day, came to the phone to hear the news. It was 10:25 a.m. and I was sitting on my couch in bed. “Oh fuck.” I was still thinking about the gun point. “How would you feel right now if you found out a stranger was sticking a gun in your head?” “The worst thing anyone can do to you is shoot you. But they might have shot you or hit you in the forehead. That might be worse,” she suggested. She thought about what she’d experienced when she was arrested during the riot in Oakland, when two police officers broke down the door of her apartment, and shot her in the head with their own weapons. “They just hit me in the head, like, “Bam!” Rojas laughed. Then she said she felt lucky. She was wearing a T-shirt. “Even a gun-toting stranger couldn’t shoot me in the head.” She looked at me