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. 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…