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Pre-sentence reports (PSRs) provide important information about an individual's background and circumstances to assist judicial officers in the sentencing process. The present study analyzed PSRs for 63 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people sentenced by either an Indigenous sentencing court or a mainstream court in the Australian State of Victoria. Using natural language processing techniques, our analyses revealed few differences between PSRs conducted for each court. However, PSRs were found to predominantly feature key words that are risk-based, with mainstream court PSRs more negatively worded than the Indigenous sentencing court's PSRs. This may have been due to the inclusion of results from a risk and need assessment tool. Pro-social factors did comprise more than one third of extracted keywords, although the number of strength-based culture-related keywords, in particular, was low across PSRs in both courts. It is possible that courts may not be receiving all the information needed to promote individualized justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rates of mental illness are significantly higher in prison populations compared to the general community; however, little research has examined the rates of mental illness for cross-cultural groups of prisoners in Australia. This omission is concerning given the increasingly diverse nature of the Australian prison population. To address this gap in knowledge, the present study aimed to identify rates of key mental health factors and associated psychological processes in a cohort of 191 men from culturally and linguistically diverse, Indigenous Australian and English-speaking backgrounds who were incarcerated at a maximum-security prison in Victoria, Australia. We also explored differences in both psychological distress levels and predictors of psychological distress. Although no significant mental health differences were identified cross-culturally, the results revealed that several mental health factors predicted psychological distress for all prisoners, F(11, 147) = 33.23, p < .001, R2 = .71. The experiences of anxiety and sleep disturbance-related symptoms, β = .34; depressive symptoms, β = .19; posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, β = .25; and the use of psychological processes, such as avoidance coping, β = .16; and engagement in cognitive fusion, β = .15, all predicted psychological distress. The use of positive thinking as a coping strategy was found to predict a reduced level of psychological distress for prisoners, β = -.13. The findings indicated that the mental health profiles of cross-cultural groups of prisoners are similar in nature, suggesting that justice involvement may be a more useful predictor than cultural differences concerning psychological health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]