5.2 Sample

The MHDCD cohort is a purposive rather than a representative sample, intentionally focusing on those individuals with known mental health disorder and cognitive disability diagnoses who have been in prison. The cohort also contains a small group of individuals who have no recorded MHDCD diagnosis (n= 174) allowing for some comparison. Men make up the majority of the MHDCD cohort at 89% (n= 2,431), with a smaller proportion of 11% (n= 300) being women. The individuals in the sample were on average 35.7 years old at the time of data collection in 2008, and ranged from age 17 to 75. The fact that a number in the cohort were over 60 biased the average ages calculated and provided at various points in this report.

Figure 1: Indigenous vs. Non-Indigenous sub-cohorts by study group