"On Life Support: Public Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new report from the Vera Institute of Justice as part of a new initiative called Justice Reform for Healthy Communities. A helpful report overview starts this way:

Each year, millions of incarcerated people — who experience chronic health conditions, infectious diseases, substance use, and mental illness at much higher rates than the general population — return home from correctional institutions to communities that are already rife with health disparities, violence, and poverty, among other structural inequities.

For several generations, high rates of incarceration among residents in these communities has further contributed to diminished educational opportunities, fractured family structures, stagnated economic mobility, limited housing options, and restricted access to essential social entitlements.

Several factors in today’s policy climate indicate that the political discourse on crime and punishment is swinging away from the punitive, tough-on-crime values that dominated for decades, and that the time is ripe to fundamentally rethink the function of the criminal justice system in ways that can start to address the human toll that mass incarceration has had on communities.

At the same time, the nation’s healthcare system is undergoing a historic overhaul due to the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  Many provisions of the ACA provide tools needed to address long-standing health disparities. Among these are:

> Bolstering community capacity by expanding Medicaid eligiblity, expanding coverage and parity for behavioral health treatment, and reducing health disparities.

> Strengthening front-end alternatives to arrest, prosecution, and incarceration.

> Bridging health and justice systems by coordinating outreach and care, enrolling people in Medicaid and subsidized health plans across the criminal justice continuum, using Medicaid waivers and innovation funding to extend coverage to new groups, and advancing health information technology.