Health and Incarceration

Health and Incarceration
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 67
Release: 2013-08-08
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0309287715

Over the past four decades, the rate of incarceration in the United States has skyrocketed to unprecedented heights, both historically and in comparison to that of other developed nations. At far higher rates than the general population, those in or entering U.S. jails and prisons are prone to many health problems. This is a problem not just for them, but also for the communities from which they come and to which, in nearly all cases, they will return. Health and Incarceration is the summary of a workshop jointly sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences(NAS) Committee on Law and Justice and the Institute of Medicine(IOM) Board on Health and Select Populations in December 2012. Academics, practitioners, state officials, and nongovernmental organization representatives from the fields of healthcare, prisoner advocacy, and corrections reviewed what is known about these health issues and what appear to be the best opportunities to improve healthcare for those who are now or will be incarcerated. The workshop was designed as a roundtable with brief presentations from 16 experts and time for group discussion. Health and Incarceration reviews what is known about the health of incarcerated individuals, the healthcare they receive, and effects of incarceration on public health. This report identifies opportunities to improve healthcare for these populations and provides a platform for visions of how the world of incarceration health can be a better place.

Reform in a Prison Hospital

Reform in a Prison Hospital
Author: Stanley Anderson
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2009
Genre: Law
ISBN: 059553208X

Following an overview of America's "Shameful Prisons," this book dissects the stream of reprisals imposed upon the physician who blew the whistle to uncover a culture of mediocrity that tolerated severe deficiencies in the quality of medical care afforded to inmates in the Nebraska State prison system. Using two thousand pages of detailed incident reports and verbatim court transcripts, the author dramatizes the conflict by quoting what the protagonists actually said. The Nebraska Ombudsman spent fourteen months probing a dozen areas of alleged deleliction including diagnosis of chest pain, transmission of communicable diseases, deteriorated equipment, insufficient training of nurses, wavering standards for referral to outside specialists, and inhumane pain management. Exhaustive documentation and extensive press coverage enabled the author to highlight both the hospital leadership's opposition to the Ombudsman's intervention and the Nebraska Governor's personal denigration of the Ombudsman. The findings of the Governor's blue ribbon Task Force echoed the Ombudsman's recommendations. The State Legislature enacted comprehensive and durable remedial legislation. "How trenchantly informing I find your "Prelude" on "Shameful Prisons to be. Needless to say, what it teaches is not something we want to learn. But, having sanctioned this incarceration regime, we American voters must sit still to hear the truth about what, in our willful stupidity, we have caused to happen." Thomas Schrock, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara "[This] is certainly a story worth being told and has important implications for correctional systems everywhere." Marshall Lux, Nebraska State Ombudsman

The Prison Reform Movement

The Prison Reform Movement
Author: Larry E. Sullivan
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
Total Pages: 188
Release: 1990
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Traces the history of prison reform in the United States, as the reformers attempt to set up a system that would deter further crime and rehabilitate convicts come into conflict with the need to punish and the inherent character of imprisonment.

Public Health Behind Bars

Public Health Behind Bars
Author: Robert Greifinger
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 588
Release: 2007-10-04
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0387716955

Public Health Behind Bars From Prisons to Communities examines the burden of illness in the growing prison population, and analyzes the impact on public health as prisoners are released. This book makes a timely case for correctional health care that is humane for those incarcerated and beneficial to the communities they reenter.

Mental Health in Prisons

Mental Health in Prisons
Author: Alice Mills
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2018-11-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319940902

This book examines how the prison environment, architecture and culture can affect mental health as well as determine both the type and delivery of mental health services. It also discusses how non-medical practices, such as peer support and prison education programs, offer the possibility of transformative practice and support. By drawing on international contributions, it furthermore demonstrates how mental health in prisons is affected by wider socio-economic and cultural factors, and how in recent years neo-liberalism has abandoned, criminalised and contained large numbers of the world’s most marginalised and vulnerable populations. Overall, this collection challenges the dominant narrative of individualism by focusing instead on the relationship between structural inequalities, suffering, survival and punishment. Chapter 2 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

Waiting for an Echo

Waiting for an Echo
Author: Christine Montross
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2021-07-20
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0143110667

“A haunting and harrowing indictment . . . [a] significant achievement.” —The New York Times Book Review L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist * New York Times Book Review Paperback Row * Time Best New Books July 2020 Waiting for an Echo is a riveting, rarely seen glimpse into American jails and prisons. It is also a damning account of policies that have criminalized mental illness, shifting large numbers of people who belong in therapeutic settings into punitive ones. Dr. Christine Montross has spent her career treating the most severely ill psychiatric patients. This expertise—the mind in crisis—has enabled her to reckon with the human stories behind mass incarceration. A father attempting to weigh the impossible calculus of a plea bargain. A bright young woman whose life is derailed by addiction. Boys in a juvenile detention facility who, desperate for human connection, invent a way to communicate with one another from cell to cell. Overextended doctors and correctional officers who strive to provide care and security in environments riddled with danger. Our methods of incarceration take away not only freedom but also selfhood and soundness of mind. In a nation where 95 percent of all inmates are released from prison and return to our communities, this is a practice that punishes us all.

A Plague of Prisons

A Plague of Prisons
Author: Ernest Drucker
Publisher: New Press, The
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1595589538

The public health expert and prison reform activist offers “meticulous analysis” on our criminal justice system and the plague of American incarceration (The Washington Post). An internationally recognized public health scholar, Ernest Drucker uses the tools of epidemiology to demonstrate that incarceration in the United States has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic. He argues that imprisonment, originally conceived as a response to the crimes of individuals, has become “mass incarceration”: a destabilizing force that damages the very social structures that prevent crime. Drucker tracks the phenomenon of mass incarceration using basic public health concepts—“incidence and prevalence,” “outbreaks,” “contagion,” “transmission,” “potential years of life lost.” The resulting analysis demonstrates that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries. Sure to provoke debate and shift the paradigm of how we think about punishment, A Plague of Prisons offers a novel perspective on criminal justice in twenty-first-century America. “How did America’s addiction to prisons and mass incarceration get its start and how did it spread from state to state? Of the many attempts to answer this question, none make as much sense as the explanation found in [this] book.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

Ethical Considerations for Research Involving Prisoners

Ethical Considerations for Research Involving Prisoners
Author: Committee on Ethical Considerations for Revisions to DHHS Regulations for Protection of Prisoners Involved in Research
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2007-01-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0309164605

In the past 30 years, the population of prisoners in the United States has expanded almost 5-fold, correctional facilities are increasingly overcrowded, and more of the country's disadvantaged populations—racial minorities, women, people with mental illness, and people with communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, and tuberculosis—are under correctional supervision. Because prisoners face restrictions on liberty and autonomy, have limited privacy, and often receive inadequate health care, they require specific protections when involved in research, particularly in today's correctional settings. Given these issues, the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Human Research Protections commissioned the Institute of Medicine to review the ethical considerations regarding research involving prisoners. The resulting analysis contained in this book, Ethical Considerations for Research Involving Prisoners, emphasizes five broad actions to provide prisoners involved in research with critically important protections: • expand the definition of "prisoner"; • ensure universally and consistently applied standards of protection; • shift from a category-based to a risk-benefit approach to research review; • update the ethical framework to include collaborative responsibility; and • enhance systematic oversight of research involving prisoners.

Simulation Strategies to Reduce Recidivism

Simulation Strategies to Reduce Recidivism
Author: Faye S. Taxman
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2013-06-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 146146188X

The use of simulation modeling in criminal justice dates back to the 1970s. Early models were developed to capture the realities of the criminal justice system, to identify what changes were needed, and how small changes would affect the overall picture. Significant time and effort were devoted to these projects and although they achieved some success, the complex nature of the criminal justice system and the difficulties associated with improving and maintaining the models prohibited wide spread adoption in the field. Some of the problems with early simulation projects were the lack of data to validate models, the lack of technical skills needed by staff to design and build the models, and the technical difficulties with software programming to transform models into computerized representations. As simulation modeling has becoming a more popular technique across many disciplines, and technology as well as the technical skills of researchers has improved, this book revisits the concept of simulation modeling with new applications for the criminal justice system. The wider availability of data has made for more opportunity to verify and validate models; computing software has become more available and easier to use; and the capacity for visualization and communication of models shows promise for the future of simulation in criminal justice. The time has come to examine the past, present, and future contributions of simulation modeling to the field of criminal justice. This work provides a central resource of information for the current state of simulation modeling, and overview of existing techniques and cases of success, and directions for future development. This work will be an important resource for researchers in criminal justice and related fields, as well as those studying policy-related topics.

Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish
Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2012-04-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307819299

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.