[Report] Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America

 

Among other issues, this is definitely a mental health concern. As quoted above, Serious mental illness affects men and women in jail at rates four to six times higher in the general population.

Excerpts….

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• Jail is revolving door for mental health care
• Report finds jails disproportionately house mentally ill and nonviolent offenders
• Lawmakers call mental illness ‘epidemic’

Imprisonment and Public Health | thefeverblog

Imprisonment and Public Health | thefeverblog.

Excerpt from the 8 December 2014 post

December 8, 2014 thefeverblog Leave a comment

Mass incarceration in the United States goes beyond the logistical issues of overcrowded prisons. A shallow mindset wouldn’t identify the connection between mass incarceration and public health, but it’s prevalent and significance is being recognized. An article published in the New York Times briefly discusses the impact mass incarceration has on public health. It touches on a report published by the Vera Institute of Justice, which is an organization that focuses on making justice systems fairer through research and innovation. Most people in prisons come from impoverished communities, and therefore have low health-status.  Specifically, people in prisons have higher rates of chronic disease, mental illness, and substance abuse.

But that’s really the obvious part of the mass incarceration-public health relationship. Overcrowding exacerbates health problems, especially communicable diseases such as flu and other viral infections. In a previous post, I shared how social reform in Russia led to mass incarceration and in turn one of the largest outbreaks of tuberculosis in history. Mental illness  and substance abuse are major problems in jails, and the problem isn’t being addressed adequately. Although over 45% of incarcerated people have a mental illness and over 68% have substance abuse issues, only 15% receive proper treatment.

But that’s not even the  real problem. [My emphasis] Our justice system is focused on penalizing, so vulnerable people coming out of prison are unable to receive any assistance because their actions have removed their eligibility. On first glance, the conservative argument would be that felons shouldn’t be privy to housing, medical, and financial assistance. But the whole picture has to be taken into consideration. Families can be easily torn apart by a family member being incarcerated, especially when parents are taken away from children.

…

 

Mass incarceration in the United States goes beyond the logistical issues of overcrowded prisons. A shallow mindset wouldn’t identify the connection between mass incarceration and public health, but it’s prevalent and significance is being recognized. An article published in the New York Times briefly discusses the impact mass incarceration has on public health. It touches on a report published by the Vera Institute of Justice, which is an organization that focuses on making justice systems fairer through research and innovation. Most people in prisons come from impoverished communities, and therefore have low health-status.  Specifically, people in prisons have higher rates of chronic disease, mental illness, and substance abuse.

But that’s really the obvious part of the mass incarceration-public health relationship. Overcrowding exacerbates health problems, especially communicable diseases such as flu and other viral infections. In a previous post, I shared how social reform in Russia led to mass incarceration and in turn one of the largest outbreaks of tuberculosis in history. Mental illness  and substance abuse are major problems in jails, and the problem isn’t being addressed adequately. Although over 45% of incarcerated people have a mental illness and over 68% have substance abuse issues, only 15% receive proper treatment.

Related articles

• “Mentally Ill in Prison” Mother Jones Search
• Bioethicists Call for Return to Asylums for Long-Term Psychiatric Care

[Press release] Released prisoners are more likely to suffer early death

From the 13 May press release at Georgia State News

Men who have been incarcerated and released are more than twice as likely to die prematurely as those who have not been imprisoned, according to a new study published by Georgia State University criminologist William Alex Pridemore.

Former prisoners are more likely to die early from infectious and respiratory diseases, drug overdoses and homicides. Causes of this “mortality penalty” include increased exposure to diseases like TB and HIV, the prolonged stress of the prison environment, the disruption of important social bonds and, upon release, the struggle to reintegrate into society and employment.

“We know that stress can weaken immune systems,” Pridemore said. “And in a very unpleasant twist of events, at the precise moment when these men are most vulnerable to a compromised immune system due to stress – that is, when they are incarcerated – they are most exposed to a host of communicable diseases whose rates are much higher in the prison population.”

Pridemore’s empirical analysis of the Izhevsk (Russia) Family Study, was published online this month in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Titled “The Mortality Penalty of Incarceration: Evidence from a Population-based Case-control Study of Working Age Males,” it is among the first sociological studies to look at the short- and long-term impacts of incarceration on the mortality of prisoners after their release.

More than 2.5 million people are incarcerated in the United States – 95 percent of whom will eventually be released. Incarceration rates in the United States and Russia, at 730 and 519 per 100,000 residents, are among the highest in the world.

MEDIA CONTACT

Jennifer French Giarratano
404-413-0028
jgiarratano@gsu.edu

“Earlier research looked at the collateral consequences of mass imprisonment that started in the 1970s, when the U.S. went on an incarceration binge. Most focused on incarceration’s limits on job prospects and earnings, marriages and its impact on communities,” he said. “Now research is turning to its impact on health.

“Ironically, prisons provide an opportunity to screen and treat a population that may be unlikely or unable to take advantage of community-based health care,” he continued. “Prisons should work with inmates, prior to their release, and provide health screenings and treatment and help them plan for their short-term and long-term health care needs. This investment will benefit not only the individual health of current and former prisoners, but also taxpayers and the broader community by way of improved population health.

Pridemore’s findings are timely given the recent release of the National Research Council’s report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States, which has politicians and the public reconsidering mass incarceration.

“Careful research shows that many of the consequences of contact with the penal system – especially the mortality penalty of incarceration – go well beyond what we consider just punishment,” he said.
###

William Alex Pridemore is a Distinguished University Professor in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. His research focuses on the social structure and violence and the sociology of health.

Hepatitis C Cure May Be Too Expensive for Prisoners – Stateline

Surely, as one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we can find a way to provide basic health care for all.
And this includes prisoners, they too are human beings.

 

Hepatitis C Cure May Be Too Expensive for Prisoners – Stateline.

If used widely, a new generation of antiviral drugs has the potential to wipe out the deadly hepatitis C virus in the United States. But the high price of the drugs might prevent their use in prisons, which house as many as one-third of those who are infected.

The drugs cost anywhere from about $65,000 to $170,000 for a single course of treatment—between three and nine times more than earlier treatments. Ronald Shansky, former medical director of the Illinois prison system and founder of the Society of Correctional Physicians, described that price as “extortionarily high, criminal.”

…

HIV Precedent
States and municipalities typically pay for prisoner health care out of their corrections budgets. When effective HIV treatments emerged in the late 1990s, those budgets grew to accommodate the cost of the drugs, said Edward Harrison, president of National Commission on Correctional Health Care, which sets standards for prisoner health care.

But the new hepatitis C medications present a much bigger challenge. “The prevalence of HCV [hepatitis C) is 10 times greater than HIV and the cost of treatment is probably 10 times greater than a year’s worth of treating HIV,” said Anne Spaulding of Emory University, one of the leading researchers on hepatitis C in prisons.

 

…

The new hepatitis C drugs and others in the pipeline could be the “straw that breaks the back of corrections” and force large-scale changes in penal systems. Already, as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court decision, California has had to reduce its prison population by tens of thousands because of inadequate health care. Spaulding said she can foresee the high costs of medicine could force cuts in prison populations across the United States.

Another possibility, she said, would be to create a different mechanism for paying for prison health care, perhaps by extending Medicaid to jail and prison populations.

One thing is clear: The goal of eradicating hepatitis C won’t be achieved unless the campaign involves prisons.

“Because of these new drugs, the conversation about eliminating hepatitis C is finally happening,” said Ninburg of the Hepatitis Education Project. “But if it’s going to be eliminated, we are going to have to address hep C in the correctional setting.”

Related articles

• Hepatitis C: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Torture: The Use of Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons

Strongly believe solitary confinement  is a mental health issue.

How we treat the least of us is a reliable measure of just how human we are.

I’ve been know to take to the streets, so to speak, against war & the death penalty.
Most recently at the Supreme Court at the annual Starvin’ for Justice event this past June/July.
These days, when I don’t take to the streets I voice through other means, including this blog.

From https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=516200851781018&set=a.509091729158597.1073741827.184364598297980&type=1&theater

That’s me on the left holding up the sign.  Kirk Bloodsworth, the speaker, is the first person exonerated from death row using DNA technology. The gentleman on the right holding up a sign is another Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (the preferred title of those of us who served). We shared stories, and perhaps reflected on how our overseas service shaped our views on peace and justice.

(For anyone who would say “get a job”, well my reply is witnessing against injustice is my job.)
(Oh, and for the record, I am now gainfully employed for the first time in three long years of job hunting.
Being unemployed against one’s will certainly is a mental health issue, but nothing compared to greater injustices)

The Hole (Photo credit: Chris.Gray)

From the Web Page of the Center for Constitutional Rights

….

Ever since solitary confinement came into existence, it has been used as a tool of repression. While it is justified by corrections officials as necessary to protect prisoners and guards from violent superpredators, all too often it is imposed on individuals, particularly prisoners of color, who threaten prison administrations in an altogether different way. Consistently, jailhouse lawyers and jailhouse doctors, who administer to the needs of their fellow prisoners behind bars, are placed in solitary confinement. They are joined by political prisoners from various civil rights and independence movements.

CCR’s Challenges to Solitary Confinement

In May 2012, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a lawsuit against the state of California for its use of prolonged solitary confinement in the infamous Pelican Bay prison. Ruiz, et al. v. Brown, Jr., et al., is a federal class action challenging prolonged solitary confinement and deprivation of due process, based on the rights guaranteed under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, at Pelican Bay. The case challenges inhumane, unconstitutional conditions under which thousands of prisoners live. Ruiz reasserts the importance of fundamental human rights and the Constitution’s guarantee that no one may be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, and that all are entitled to the due process of law.

CCR’s case against solitary confinement at Pelican Bay is the latest in a long history of challenges to the use of isolation in prisons. InWilkinson v. Austin, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in support of CCR’s claims that prison officials cannot confine prisoners in long-term solitary confinement in a
super maximum prison without first giving them the opportunity to challenge their placement. CCR has engaged in solidarity efforts alongside hunger striking prisoners, as well as engaged in advocacy and education efforts around the impact of the use of isolation in prisons.

Solitary Confinement is Torture

The devastating psychological and physical effects of prolonged solitary confinement are well documented by social scientists: prolonged solitary confinement causes prisoners significant mental harm and places them at grave risk of even more devastating future psychological harm.

Researchers have demonstrated that prolonged solitary confinement causes a persistent and heightened state of anxiety and nervousness, headaches, insomnia, lethargy or chronic tiredness, nightmares, heart palpitations, and fear of impending nervous breakdowns. Other documented effects include obsessive ruminations, confused thought processes, an oversensitivity to
stimuli, irrational anger, social withdrawal, hallucinations, violent fantasies, emotional flatness, mood swings, chronic depression, feelings of overall deterioration, as well as suicidal ideation.

Exposure to such life-shattering conditions clearly constitutes cruel and unusual punishment – in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Further, the brutal use of solitary has been condemned as torture by the international community.

A Growing Human Rights Movement against the Use of Solitary Confinement

Across the United States and the world, there is an emerging movement calling for the end of solitary confinement.

In the U.S., prisoner-led movements have attracted media attention and public scrutiny to harsh conditions of confinement, including overcrowding, the use of isolation, deplorable health conditions, substandard medical care, and the discriminatory and careless treatment of people with mental illnesses. Several prisoner-led hunger strikes have drawn attention to these harsh
conditions, including efforts in Georgia, Ohio and California. Advocates have joined in solidarity and alongside prisoners to protest the use of solitary confinement.

International human rights experts and bodies have also condemned indefinite or prolonged solitary confinement, recommended that the practice be abolished entirely and argued that solitary confinement is a human rights abuse that can amount to torture. In August 2011, Juan Mendez, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, concluded that even 15 days in solitary confinement constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and 15 days is the limit after which irreversible harmful psychological effects can occur. However, many prisoners in the United States have been isolated for far longer.

Read more at http://ccrjustice.org/solitary-factsheet

Related articles

• Citing Solitary Confinement Concerns, UN Demands Access To California Prisons (mintpressnews.com)
• Wasted Minds: An Insider’s Look at the Torturous Effects of U.S. Solitary Confinement (moorbey.wordpress.com)
• California lawmakers examine solitary confinement (sacbee.com)
• Solitary Confinement and the Criminal Justice Debate (ppgreview.ca)
• UN Top Torture Investigator Wants Access to American Prisons (alternet.org)
• Does Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons Qualify as Torture? (sitehighway.com)
• Two notable new ACLU reports on solitary confinement in US prisons (sentencing.typepad.com)
• Prison overcrowding could amount to torture: UN (abc.net.au)
• California And Louisiana Death Row Conditions Result In Torture, Report Finds (eurasiareview.com)
• !Virginia takes a STAND AGAINST SOLITARY CONFINEMENT! (halleluja) (childreninprison.wordpress.com)

Prisoners Doing Yoga May See Psychological Benefits

yoga (Photo credit: GO INTERACTIVE WELLNESS)

 

From the 11 July 2013 article at Science Daily

 

Yoga can improve mood and mental wellbeing among prisoners, an Oxford University study suggests, and may also have an effect on impulsive behaviour.

The researchers found that prisoners after a ten-week yoga course reported improved mood, reduced stress and were better at a task related to behaviour control than those who continued in their normal prison routine.

‘We found that the group that did the yoga course showed an improvement in positive mood, a decrease in stress and greater accuracy in a computer test of impulsivity and attention,’ say Dr Amy Bilderbeck and Dr Miguel Farias, who led the study at the Departments of Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry at Oxford University. ‘The suggestion is that yoga is helpful for these prisoners.’

Dr Bilderbeck adds: ‘This was only a preliminary study, but nothing has been done like this before. Offering yoga sessions in prisons is cheap, much cheaper than other mental health interventions. If yoga has any effect on addressing mental health problems in prisons, it could save significant amounts of public money.’

…

If yoga is associated with improving behaviour control, as suggested by the results of the computer test, there may be implications for managing aggression, antisocial or problem behaviour in prisons and on return to society, the researchers note — though this is not measured in this initial study.

Dr Bilderbeck, who practices yoga herself, cautions: ‘We’re not saying that organising a weekly yoga session in a prison is going to suddenly turn prisons into calm and serene places, stop all aggression and reduce reoffending rates. We’re not saying that yoga will replace standard treatment of mental health conditions in prison. But what we do see are indications that this relatively cheap, simple option might have multiple benefits for prisoners’ wellbeing and possibly aid in managing the burden of mental health problems in prisons.’

Sam Settle, director of the Prison Phoenix Trust, says: ‘Almost half of adult prisoners return to prison within a year, having created more victims of crime, so finding ways to offset the damaging effects of prison life is essential for us as a society. This research confirms what prisoners have been consistently telling the Prison Phoenix Trust for 25 years: yoga and meditation help them feel better, make better decisions and develop the capacity to think before acting — all essential in leading positive, crime-free lives once back in the community.’

 

Related articles

• Yoga Improves Mental Health Among Prisoners (medindia.net)
• Prisoners should do yoga as a cheap way of improving their behaviour, according to academics (telegraph.co.uk)
• Teaching prisoners yoga stops them bending rules, says study (oxfordmail.co.uk)

 

Oklahoma Looks for Ways to Keep Mentally Ill Ex-offenders Out of Prison

English: Oklahoma State Penitentiary (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

From the 23 October 2012 article at Stateline Daily

 

…

Central to that program is ensuring that participants leave custody already signed up for Social Security Disability and Medicaid, which immediately provides them with some income and health care and – crucial for them – psychiatric medication and counseling.

By comparison, unless they are disabled in some way, typical inmates leaving prison in Oklahoma do not qualify for either Social Security or Medicaid benefits. Usually, they are given a lift to the bus station, a ticket to anywhere they want to go in the state, $50, and sometimes a handshake.

Lowering Recidivism

If the measure of success is keeping mentally ill ex-offenders out of prison, the Oklahoma Collaborative Mental Health Re-Entry Program has been a success. The recidivism rate over a three-year span for those participating in the program is 25.2 percent, compared to the 42.3 percent rate for a comparable prison population before the program started in 2007. On the basis of those results, the program earned an innovation award this year from the Council of State Governments.

Law enforcement is positive about the program as well. “Anything that keeps them on their medication and in treatment is a positive step,” says Phil Cotten, acting director of the Oklahoma Association of Chiefs of Police.

Not the least of those extolling the program are its beneficiaries, some of whom have no doubt about the boomerang route their post-prison life would have followed without the re-entry experiment…

..

Criminalizing Mental Illness

Like every other state, Oklahoma has seen a correlation between the emptying of its psychiatric hospitals in the sixties and seventies and its ever-increasing prison population. According to Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections, half of its prisoners have a history of or currently exhibit some form of mental illness (resulting in a threefold increase in the number of prisoners receiving psychotropic drugs between 1998 and 2006). Some call it the criminalization of mental illness. In a different time, many of the symptomatic mentally ill ended up in psychiatric wards; today they go to prison, a situation that Robert Powitsky, the chief mental officer of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, calls a “travesty.”

“The new front-line mental health workers are law enforcement officers and the new psychiatric hospitals are the prisons and the jails,” says Powitzky, who has spent most of his four-decade long career as a psychologist in prison systems. “It’s wrong, it’s just plain wrong.”…

 

Jailhouse Phone Calls Reveal Why Domestic Violence Victims Recant

Suzanne Perry, Domestic violence victim advocate (via Wikipedia, public domain image)

From the 17 August Medical News Today article

A new study uses – for the first time – recorded jailhouse telephone conversations between men charged with felony domestic violence and their victims to help reveal why some victims decide not to follow through on the charges. Researchers listened to telephone conversations between 17 accused male abusers in a Washington state detention facility and their female victims, all of whom decided to withdraw their accusations of abuse. For each of the couples, the researchers analyzed up to about three hours of phone conversations…

…After analyzing the calls, the researchers identified a five-step process that went from the victims vigorously defending themselves in the phone calls to agreeing to a plan to recant their testimony against the accused abuser.

Typically, in the first and second conversations there is a heated argument between the couple, revolving around the event leading to the abuse charge. In these early conversations, the victim is strong, and resists the accused perpetrator’s account of what happens.

“The victim starts out with a sense of determination and is eager to advocate for herself, but gradually that erodes as the phone calls continue,” said Bonomi, who is also an affiliate with the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle.

In the second stage, the perpetrator minimizes the abuse and tries to convince the victim that what happened wasn’t that serious. In one couple, where the victim suffered strangulation and a severe bite to the face, the accused perpetrator repeatedly reminded the victim that he was being charged with “felony assault,” while asking whether she thought he deserved the felony charge….

…“The tipping point for most victims occurs when the perpetrator appeals to her sympathy, by describing how much he is suffering in jail, how depressed he is, and how much he misses her and their children,” Bonomi said. 

“The perpetrator casts himself as the victim, and quite often the real victim responds by trying to soothe and comfort the abuser.” [Flahiff’s emphasis]

Read the entire news article

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• B.C. radio station under fire over on-air domestic violence comments (canada.com)
• How Long Does Domestic Violence Last? (cshennecy.wordpress.com)
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Black men survive longer in prison than out: study

From a 14 July 2011 Health News Today item

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Black men are half as likely to die at any given time if they’re in prison than if they aren’t, suggests a new study of North Carolina inmates.

The black prisoners seemed to be especially protected against alcohol- and drug-related deaths, as well as lethal accidents and certain chronic diseases.

But that pattern didn’t hold for white men, who on the whole were slightly more likely to die in prison than outside, according to findings published in Annals of Epidemiology.

Researchers say it’s not the first time a study has found lower death rates among certain groups of inmates — particularly disadvantaged people, who might get protection against violent injuries and murder.

“Ironically, prisons are often the only provider of medical care accessible by these underserved and vulnerable Americans,” said Hung-En Sung of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“Typically, prison-based care is more comprehensive than what inmates have received prior to their admission,” Sung, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told Reuters Health by email….