Documenting and Addressing the Health Impacts of Carceral Systems

• Published in: American journal of public health (1971) Vol. 110; no. S1; p. S5
• Main Authors: Cloud, David H, Bassett, Mary T, Graves, Jasmine, Fullilove, Robert E, Brinkley-Rubinstein, Lauren
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Public Health Association 01.01.2020
• Subjects: AJPH Editor's Choice; Black or African American; Black People; Criminal sentences; Drug policy; Health education; Health promotion; Healthcare Disparities; Households; Human Rights; Humans; Imprisonment; Mass incarceration; Other Race/Ethnicity; Police; Poverty; Prisoners; Prisons; Public goods; Public Health; Public Health Practice; Racial inequality; Racism; Security; Social systems; United States; United States; United States > US
• ISSN: 0090-0036; 1541-0048; 1541-0048
• DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2019.305475

No other industrialized democracy has a carceral system that is as expansive, punitive, and racialized as that of the United States. More than 2.2 million people in 2018 were incarcerated in jails and prisons, a six-fold increase since the 1970s. Each year more than 600 000 people are released from prisons and more than 11 million cycle through jails, extending the effects of incarceration into households and shaping community health.Mass incarceration is the result of social, political, and economic forces with deep roots in the aftermaths of slavery, labor exploitation, and racial discrimination. This is evident in the stark racial inequalities that exist in the carceral system. Black people are more likely to be arrested, killed by police, incarcerated, and placed in solitary confinement than their White counterparts. The criminalization of blackness and poverty, as reflected in the failed war on drugs, draconian sentencing laws, centralized power ofprosecutors, a school-to-prison pipeline, and gutting of health and social systems, is among the forces underlying the titanic expansion and deep entrenchment of the carceral state. Over the past 40 years, our society has deliberately divested from social and public goods designed to promote health and economic security while pumping resources into police, courts, and correctional systems that punish, impoverish, and dehumanize people and communities.