Data show people in prison suffer disproportionately from asthma, hepatitis C, HIV, & other conditions.
Prison Policy Initiative updates for June 22, 2022 Exposing how mass incarceration harms communities and our national welfare
New report, Chronic Punishment, reveals the unmet health needs of people in state prisons [[link removed]]
A new report from the Prison Policy Initiative offers the most recent national data on incarcerated people’s health, and shows that U.S. state prisons are continuing to ignore the plight of people in their care. The report, Chronic Punishment: The unmet health needs of people in state prisons, [[link removed]] examines the Bureau of Justice Statistics’s Survey of Prison Inmates and breaks down the prevalence of several chronic conditions in this country’s state prisons. The report also takes a deep dive into the medical histories of people behind bars.
Key findings in Chronic Punishment include:
People in state prisons suffer disproportionately from asthma, hepatitis C, HIV, and substance use disorder. Significant numbers of people in state prisons also suffer from illnesses such as heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes, which are exacerbated behind bars. Half (50%) of people in state prisons lacked health insurance upon the arrest that led to their incarceration, and those with insurance disproportionately received Medicaid, a sign that poverty, exclusion from the healthcare system, and incarceration overlap significantly in this country.
Other standout findings in the report suggest that state prisons, nationally, are not treating medical problems among incarcerated people:
Four in 10 (43%) people in state prison report one or more diagnosed mental health conditions, and women’s rates are even higher. Yet only about one-fourth (26%) have received some sort of professional help for their mental health since entering prison. 19% of people in state prisons report having gone without a single health-related visit since entering prison. Existing research suggests that many people who go to prison die prematurely: Cancer is more deadly in prison [[link removed]] than on the outside, and people recently released from prison have a higher risk of hospitalization and death from heart disease than the average person. In the first two weeks after release from prison, individuals face a risk of death that is more than 12 times higher [[link removed]] than for non-incarcerated individuals.
The report, which includes 15 powerful data visualizations, analyzes how the typical individual in state prison lacked healthcare long before their incarceration and how prison doctors often diagnose problems that prisons lack the capacity to treat. The report takes a particularly close look at how incarcerated women fare medically, including a section about the treatment of people who are pregnant.
Chronic Punishment is the second installment in the Prison Policy Initiative’s analysis of the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, a national dataset released last year that offers the most thorough and recent demographic picture of people behind bars in the U.S. This report follows the Prison Policy Initiative’s recent report Beyond the Count [[link removed]] about the adverse life experiences of people behind bars. The data cannot be disaggregated by state.
The full report is available at: [[link removed]]
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Other news: Beyond the count: A deep dive into state prison populations [[link removed]]
People in prisons have endured disadvantage and poverty all the way back to childhood. In the previous in this series of reports [[link removed]] on the Survey of Prison Inmates, we dive into the data to show that the nation's failure to address economic, educational, and other inequality, has fueled its mass incarceration crisis.
Please support our work [[link removed]]
Our work is made possible by private donations. Can you help us keep going? We can accept tax-deductible gifts online [[link removed]] or via paper checks sent to PO Box 127 Northampton MA 01061. Thank you!
Our other newsletters Ending prison gerrymandering ( archives [[link removed]]) Criminal justice research library ( archives [[link removed]])
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