Review of “Prisons and Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration”

Abstract

In Prisons and Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Jason Schnittker, Michael Massoglia, and Christopher Uggen provide a foundational and comprehensive understanding of how incarceration creates and exacerbates health disparities in the United States. This book describes how incarceration, an adverse event that is disproportionately experienced among vulnerable population groups including people of color and the poor, is a social determinant of health and wellbeing. The authors draw on more than a decade of research—much of it their own—to provide a thorough understanding of the repercussions of incarceration for people confined in carceral facilities, people reentering their families and communities after confinement, and the families and communities of currently and formerly incarcerated people. One innovative strength of this book is its focus on the paradoxical relationship between prisons and health, a paradox the authors introduce at the beginning of the book and reference throughout. The authors describe how correctional facilities are responsible for providing residents both punishment and health care (and how these two responsibilities often conflict). Medical professionals who work in prisons are responsible for upholding the conditions of confinement (such as solitary confinement, a form of segregation known to be quite damaging to mental health) and simultaneously providing care for acute and chronic physical and mental health conditions. People in prison, while enduring a loss of liberty and other rights, have a constitutional right to a particular standard of health care. It is this paradox that serves as a backdrop for understanding the relationship between incarceration and health. In highlighting this paradox, the book does a phenomenal job of describing specific aspects of health care in carceral facilities, an important descriptive point that is missing from most research on this topic. The authors describe, for example, the medical professionals who work in these facilities and the process for receiving care in these facilities. The result is a sobering assessment of the inadequate and often substandard healthcare services available to incarcerated people. The authors also describe the process (and corresponding difficulties) of receiving physical and mental health care after release from prison, which provides an even more sobering assessment of the US health care system for vulnerable groups. These accounts highlight how the health care needs of this vulnerable population are routinely ignored or overlooked.