Health Care in US State & Federal Prisons

In 1971, describing prisons as "factories of crime," Ramsey Clark (1971, pp. 212-13) wrote that "ninety-five per cent of all expenditure in the entire corrections effort of the nation is for custody--iron bars, stone walls, guards. Five per cent is for hope--health services, education, developing employment skills." One might reasonably expect that, between 1971 and 1996, conditions had changed. But the record indicates that health-care issues for prisoners have not only not been resolved but for a variety of reasons have become more complex. The prison population, as reported by the U.S. General Accounting Office, doubled in the 1980s (National Pages, 1989), and by 1994 it had increased to more than one million (Thomas, 1994; Shogren, 1994), as a number of sources report. Sources disagree, however, on the consequences of such numbers. Shogren (1994) points to a reduction in crime rel

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1996 has been unprecedented in the increase of TB and that prison populations are among the highest risk groups for this disease. Some sources suggest that prisons might be a mechanism for halting the spread of a whole range of diseases. Valway, et al. (1994) recommend that inmate transfers be evaluated with reference to the need to control infection and prevent the spread of TB. Along the same lines, Glaser and Greifinger (1993) say that the corrections system could play a positive health-care role, particularly in if it were more attuned to the epidemiology of such diseases as AIDS, TB, and venereal disease The reason is that, because of prisoner demographics, most prisoners have limited experience of medical care. Ideally, they say, a sentence period could be used to educate prisoners on health care both during and after the term. However, the record appears to be that the amount and quality of health care is in many cases substandard. Meanwhile, a few facilities appear to virtually foster poor health owing to long-term policies. Skolnik (1990) says that the hazards of tobacco use are essentially ignored by correctional facilities that sell cigarettes at deep discounts or have cigarette-manufacturing facilities on the premises
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Approximate Word count = 5141
Approximate Pages = 21 (250 words per page)

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