Date of Conferral

9-2-2026

Date of Award

September 2026

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Counselor Education and Supervision

Advisor

James Puckett

Abstract

The overrepresentation in correctional settings of persons who are seriously mentally ill and/or challenged with addiction has necessitated the presence of qualified mental health professionals. Implementation of quality mental health treatment in correctional settings has been met with various barriers, such as limited resources, physical space constraints, and safety concerns. While these barriers are present in most correctional settings, jails are more likely to encounter individuals who are experiencing acute symptoms related to mental illness and addiction, aggression, and crisis. Mental health counselors make up a significant portion of the mental health workforce in jail settings and may assume clinical supervisor positions to ensure quality treatment and foster clinical growth in their supervisees; however, the experiences of clinical supervisors have remained largely unexplored. Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenology was used to answer the question, “What are the lived experiences of mental health counselors providing clinical supervision (CS) in jail settings?” Phenomenological reduction of raw interview data, through the identification of meaning units and the use of imaginative variation, yielded the following contextual constituents: jail system, jail setting, jail client, and jail treatment, and the following proximal contextual constituents: supervisor characteristics, CS session variability, supervisee dependent, and focus on skills. This research provides positive social change implications for improving education and training for emerging mental health counselors and supervisors who intend to work in jail settings, thereby improving the quality of treatment for persons incarcerated in these settings.

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