Fascinanting press report about fascinating prisoners and public health report suppressed in 2006

This new USA Today article, headlined "Quashed report warned of prison health crisis," reports on a significant public health report that was suppressed by the Bush Administration a decade ago. Here are the interesting details:

A government report, blocked from publication a decade ago, presciently warned of an advancing, double-barreled health crisis of mental illness and substance abuse that has currently swamped the nation’s vast prison systems.

The 2006 document, prepared by then-Surgeon General Richard Carmona, urged government and community leaders to formulate a treatment strategy for thousands of sick and addicted inmates that also would assist them after release or risk worsening public health care burdens. “This (report) has demonstrated that, far from being geographically and metaphorically separated from the community as was the case with Alcatraz Island, correctional facilities and those who pass through them are an integral part of the larger community," Carmona wrote in the document titled, “The Surgeon General’s Call to Action on Corrections and Community Health."

The 49-page report, Carmona said, was quashed at the time by George W. Bush administration officials who feared that such an acknowledgement would require a financial commitment that the administration was not willing to make.

Both Carmona and Roberto Potter, who served as an editor of the document while then-detailed to the surgeon general's staff from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the decision to quash the report was relayed to them through Department of Health and Human Services officials they did not identify. "It was what they call a top-drawer veto," said Potter, now a criminal justice professor at the University of Central Florida. "We missed one of those teaching moments. When something like this goes out under the surgeon general's seal, it really carries a lot of weight."...

More than a decade after the prison report was completed, local, state and federal officials are struggling to address the same health emergency — now in full bloom — that was outlined in the pages of the surgeon general's warning. "We deny the American public essential information that they need when this information is suppressed," Carmona said. "We missed an opportunity to take appropriate action to protect the public health."

In addition to mental illness and substance abuse, the report also highlighted concerns about the prevalence of infectious and chronic diseases, urging government officials to invest in a strategy that "could build on the positive outcomes of correctional health care in ways that would benefit the larger community" when inmates are released back into society. While substance abuse was identified as "the most prevalent ailment" among inmates, the report found that mental illness was up to three times higher within U.S. jails and prisons that in the general public. "The nation's largest mental health facilities are in large urban jails," the report stated.