Prison Health Care

Abstract

By the time I completed Richard Smith's book Prison Health Care , published by the British Medical Association in 1984, I still had a number of questions that remained unanswered. For one thing, I was curious about the author, since there was no indication of his background or current affiliation. For another, I was still unsure about the book's purpose or its intended audience. Prison Health Care is a compilation of articles that appeared in the British Medical Journal . It describes the organization and provision of prison health services in England and Wales, and secondarily, in Scotland and Northern Ireland. For contrast, there are chapters that briefly describe the prison systems and their health care provision mechanisms in the Netherlands and in the US federal system. From the perspective of an American criminologist who has been involved for the past decade in improving health services for inmates, I was interested most