Originally posted by Wendy Sawyer on 02/18/2025
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Hi everyone,
This morning, the Prison Policy Initiative released a new report about correctional healthcare - providing a snapshot history of the care offered in prisons, explaining the incentives driving it today, and exploring why it is still so awful despite decades of litigation and government oversight.
Our report, Cut-Rate Care, explains that correctional healthcare is so notoriously bad because it is a service for corrections departments, not incarcerated people, and is therefore focused less on patient care and more on avoiding lawsuits. We call on state and federal lawmakers to shift the provision of prison healthcare away from DOCs and transfer it to public health agencies.
The new report covers:
• The ways prisons protect themselves against legal consequences for poor medical care, from contracts that offload responsibility onto private companies to federal and state laws that stymie legal action.
• The history of privatization in prison healthcare, including a table showing the three main business models of healthcare contracts in effect in prisons today.
• The few quality control measures for prison healthcare - government oversight, accreditation, and litigation - and why these have all ultimately failed to meaningfully improve the quality of care.
Beyond offering an overview of correctional healthcare, the report also includes:
• Policy recommendations for state and federal lawmakers.
• An appendix with a thumbnail history of the evolution of correctional healthcare, centered around the pivot to privatization since the turn of the millennium.
• Anecdotes from six incarcerated people (in six different prison systems) whom we asked about their experiences with correctional healthcare.
Our report concludes that, private or public, prison healthcare systems are caught up culturally and systemically with the handing out of punishment - something that will not change until lawmakers break down the walls between "correctional" care and public health.
Read the full report here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/healthcare.html
I hope this is useful in your work.
Take care,
Wendy
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Wendy Sawyer
Prison Policy Initiative
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