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Author Notes:

David H. Cloud, david.cloud@ucsf.edu

B.W.’s effort on this manuscript was supported, in part, by the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health under the Aging Research in Criminal Justice Health Network (grant R24AG065175) and funding from Arnold Ventures and the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation. D.C.’s effort on this manuscript was supported, in part, by the National Institute on Drug Abuse under the Lifespan/Brown University Criminal Justice Training Program on Substance Use and HIV, Brown University (grant R25DA037190).

The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review. 1The incarceration rate in El Salvador surpassed that of the United States in 2022 following a government campaign that has resulted in mass arrests of citizens. 2While prisons and jails both share many of the same challenges, jails primarily detain people serving short sentences. Prisons, by contrast, confine people serving sentences ranging from one year to life, including those sentenced to the death penalty (in 24 states). Jails are typically geographically proximal to the communities where the people in custody live and work or where they were arrested. Prisons are often farther away from urban centers, and while ~600,000 people are released annually, prison populations are more stagnant than jail populations. In some states with especially large prison populations, a substantial percentage of people sentenced to prison terms for greater than one year are housed in local jails, in part due to limited capacity within state-operated prisons. For example, more than half of people sentenced to prison in Louisiana are physically housed in parish jails.

Subject:

Keywords:

  • prisons
  • mass incarceration
  • correctional health
  • decarceration

Public Health and Prisons: Priorities in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Tools:

Journal Title:

Annual Review of Public Health

Volume:

Volume 44

Publisher:

, Pages 407-428

Type of Work:

Article | Post-print: After Peer Review

Abstract:

Mass incarceration is a sociostructural driver of profound health inequalities in the United States. The political and economic forces underpinning mass incarceration are deeply rooted in centuries of the enslavement of people of African descent and the genocide and displacement of Indigenous people and is inextricably connected to labor exploitation, racial discrimination, the criminalization of immigration, and behavioral health problems such as mental illness and substance use disorders. This article focuses on major public health crises and advances in state and federal prisons and discusses a range of practical strategies for health scholars, practitioners, and activists to promote the health and dignity of incarcerated people. It begins by summarizing the historical and sociostructural factors that have led to mass incarceration in the United States. It then describes the ways in which prison conditions create or worsen chronic, communicable, and behavioral health conditions, while highlighting priority areas for public health research and intervention to improve the health of incarcerated people, including decarceral solutions that can profoundly minimize—and perhaps one day help abolish—the use of prisons.

Copyright information:

This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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