More than two million people are incarcerated in the United States, the highest incarceration rate in the world. So perhaps it comes as no surprise that last year the popular children's television series Sesame Street introduced a character that has an incarcerated father.
With incarceration having found a home even on Sesame Street, public health practitioners, policymakers, and health care providers ought to pay closer attention to incarceration's impact on health inequality in the country, argue a team of two physicians and a medical researcher in an article published today (Oct. 6) in Annals of Internal Medicine.
Scott A. Allen, MD, a professor of medicine in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Riverside, and his colleagues report that while many people need to be in prison for the safety of society, a majority are incarcerated due to behaviors linked to treatable diseases such as mental illness and addiction.
"In such cases, incarceration will improve neither the imprisoned person nor the social problem without medical intervention," Allen writes, along with coauthors Dora M. Dumont, Ph.D., MPH, at the Rhode Island Department of Health and Josiah D. Rich, MD, MPH, at Brown University, RI.
Allen, Dumont and Rich recommend policy changes that would allow doctors to steer eligible defendants into treatment programs rather than correctional facilities, when appropriate. When incarceration is necessary, doctors and correctional facilities should coordinate transfer of patient care upon release so that gains made during incarceration are not lost, they write.
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