Public Health Behind Bars

This contributed volume takes a comprehensive look at factors that impact correctional health care and the related implications for public health and public health policy. It identifies the most compelling health problems behind bars (including communicable and chronic diseases, mental illness, addiction, and suicide), pinpoints systemic barriers to care, and explains how correctional medicine can shift from emergency or crisis care to primary care and prevention. It also discusses the impact of public policy on correctional populations and analyzes the impact on public health as prisoners are released. In this new edition, the multidisciplinary authorship continues to make a timely case for correctional health care that is humane for those incarcerated and beneficial to the communities they re-enter.

Keeping in mind that the United States of America leads the world in the percentage of its population that is incarcerated, the book grapples with whether crime in our communities is diminished by incarcerating more and more people and whether health care behind bars could improve the health status of our communities. Special concerns arise when there are prisoners with physical or mental disabilities, who have spent long periods in segregation, and others who are simply growing old.

New to the second edition are chapters on correctional nursing, sanitation to prevent intramural transmission, transitions from prisons to communities, the European experience, and root cause analysis for quality improvement, as well as revisions/updates to more than half of the chapters from the first edition that published in 2007.

Public Health Behind Bars: From Prisons to Communities, 2nd Edition, should be of immediate interest to correctional health practitioners and correctional administrators. The text also is essential reading for civil rights attorneys, journalists, scholars whose work is at the interface of criminal justice and public health, and students of criminal justice, public health, community health, healthcare administration, health policy, civil rights law, and sociology.

"In 2007, when Robert Greifinger first compiled a trove of information about the distressing intersection of public health and incarceration, it was, he says, like a textbook for a class that didn't exist. Since then the physical and mental health care crisis in our prisons and jails has aroused a national sense of urgency, and this extensively updated collection of solutions-based essays could not be more timely. It is an invaluable resource for policy-makers, educators, reform activists – and journalists".

 

          – Bill Keller, Founding Editor, The Marshall Project, New York, NY, USA