Despite a growing body of scholarship on the consequences of criminal legal contact for mental health, substantial gaps remain in our understanding of this relationship. Drawing on the stress process perspective as an organizing framework, this chapter identifies four key directions for future research. First, research should expand the measurement of criminal legal contact beyond prison incarceration to include police stops, arrests, jail incarceration, community supervision, and the varied experiences people have within carceral facilities. Second, research would benefit from incorporating broader, more comprehensive measures of mental health and from employing research designs that more rigorously address issues of causal inference and selection. Third, research should extend investigations of stress proliferation by examining the vicarious mental health consequences of criminal legal contact for underexplored family members—including siblings, children, and extended kin—and for communities. Fourth, research should more systematically examine the buffering role of coping resources, particularly the types of social support that most effectively mitigate the mental health consequences of both personal and vicarious criminal legal contact. Together, these directions offer a roadmap for deepening our understanding of how the carceral state shapes mental health across individuals, families, and communities.