Prison Reform

BACKGROUND: Over the past decade there have been numerous and impassioned calls to reform the practice of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons. This article examines the development, implementation, and processes of a restrictive housing reentry program in the Oregon Department of Corrections. It draws on data from official documents, site observations, and interviews with 12 prison officials and 38 prisoners. The Step Up Program (SUP) seeks to improve the living conditions in restrictive housing over business-as-usual, alleviate physiological and psychological harms of solitary confinement, and use rehabilitative programming to increase success upon returning to the general prison population or community...

Early modern states faced numerous challenges in supporting their prisoners of war, not least the problems of remitting them money for their subsistence, which had to pass across hostile borders. Examining how the British state achieved this in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13) shows the limits of modern scholarship on state formation and its focus on administrative reform and domestic resource mobilisation. The projection of power continued to rely on international Huguenot and even Jacobite financial networks, held together by personal trust and private interests, sometimes even while they were working for the enemy...

BACKGROUND: In light of mounting evidence of the physical and psychological harms associated with solitary confinement, many correctional systems, state legislators, courts, and even international human rights bodies are increasingly recommending and implementing reforms to mitigate the harms of solitary confinement, if not abolish the practice entirely. In this piece, we examine three specific infrastructural changes to solitary confinement conditions and practices implemented in Washington state prisons with such harm minimization goals in mind: (1) building so-called "nature imagery rooms" to play videos of outdoor spaces, (2) eliminating punishments for self-harm, and (3) conducting daily cell-front wellness checks...

Background - Interventions for inmates with Pathological Addiction (PA) still remain a problematic issue in Italian prisons, despite a 1999 major government reform transferring PA care in prison to the National Health Service. Aim of this research was to describe the integrated intervention model implemented for prisoners with PA in the Parma Penitentiary Institutes from January 2020 to June 2020. This specific approach is based on "person-tailored" therapeutic-rehabilitation programs in line with local community PA services...

INTRODUCTION: Despite extraordinary progress in HIV treatment coverage and expanding access to HIV prevention services and that multiple African countries are on track in their efforts to reach 90-90-90 goals, the epidemic continues to persist, with prevalence and incidence rates too high in some parts of the continent to achieve epidemic control. While data sources are improving, and research studies on key populations in specific contexts have improved, work on understanding the HIV burdens and barriers to services for these populations remains sparse, uneven and absent altogether in multiple settings...

The converging crises of COVID-19 and racist state violence in 2020 shifted public discourse about marginalization, public health, and racism in unprecedented ways. Nursing responded to the pandemic with heroic commitment and new politicization. But public engagement with systemic racism is forcing a reckoning in nursing. The profession has its own history of racism and of alliance with systems of state control with which to contend. In this article, we argue nursing must adopt an ethics of abolitionism to realize its goals for health and justice...

BACKGROUND: In the US, the median age of adults experiencing homelessness and incarceration is increasing. Little is known about risk factors for incarceration among older adults experiencing homelessness. To develop targeted interventions, there is a need to understand their risk factors for incarceration. OBJECTIVE: To examine the prevalence and risk factors associated with incarceration in a cohort of older adults experiencing homelessness. DESIGN: Prospective, longitudinal cohort study with interviews every 6 months for a median of 5...

This study investigated the operational dynamics of male violent offenders incarcerated in Abakaliki custodial center, Nigeria. A cross-sectional survey research design was adopted and purposive technique used to recruit 260 inmates charged with violent offenses. The data generated from structured questionnaire were analyzed using Predictive Analytic Software (PAS), with ordinary least regression, descriptive statistics and spearman rank order correlation techniques, employed in testing the variables explored...

Upon committal to one of the newly established female convict prisons in the mid-nineteenth century, women entered a system intended to regulate them in body and in mind for the ends of reform. This article interrogates how women's health needs were identified and contested by the prison officials and doctors tasked with their custody and care. It highlights the importance of broader temporal gender beliefs in dictating their treatment in this carceral space and explores how the women themselves exercised agency over the terms of their imprisonment...

Palliative care is increasingly recognized as fundamental to health and human dignity. However, a growing body of evidence highlights the variations in access to palliative care based on personal characteristics, belonging to a certain group, and socioeconomic background. Discriminatory attitudes and behaviors and lack of legal reform protecting the rights of marginalized populations are still common, particularly across Lebanon and the Middle East and North Africa region. This article presents a summary of a roundtable discussion organized by the Lebanese Medical Association for Sexual Health in collaboration with the Lebanese Center for Palliative Care-Balsam, focusing on improving palliative care provision for the following populations: prisoners; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people; refugees; migrant domestic workers; and people with substance use disorder...

Education is regarded as an avenue for success while the under-educated are disproportionately more likely to be incarcerated and remain within the correctional system. Current prison reforms have focused on increasing access to educational programming. However, these programs are not designed to address the lack of control, poor self-regulation, low emotional intelligence, inadequate social skills, or lack of internal motivation that hinder progress. Art therapy has been found effective in mitigating these impediments...

BACKGROUND: People who inject drugs (PWID) lag behind other key populations in HIV care continuum outcomes. The impacts of criminal justice reform and increasing drug treatment access on HIV have been underexplored. METHODS: We developed agent-based models (ABM) of sexual partnerships among PWID and non-PWID, and injection equipment-sharing partnerships among PWID in five US cities (Baltimore, Boston, Miami, New York City, San Francisco) over 3 years. The first set of ABM projected changes in partnership discordance among PWID as a function of decreasing ZIP code-level incarceration rates...

While research has shown magnitude of harm drives punishment decisions for crimes resulting in a prison sentence, many states impose probation rather than incarceration. A two-session experiment investigated how punishment type influences sentence length decisions. In session 1,347 participants answered online questions about their support for punishment justifications (i.e., retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation). In session 2, the online participants read a randomly assigned scenario about a clerk who stole either a smaller or larger amount of money from his employer (magnitude of harm), which the employer was either likely or unlikely to detect (detection), and the clerk received either a term of prison or probation (type of punishment)...

Background: People who experience incarceration have poor health across a variety of indicators, but we lack population-level data on the health of females in particular. We examined the health status of females released from provincial prison, and compared their data with data for males released from provincial prison and females in the general population in Ontario, Canada in 2010. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study using linked correctional and health administrative data. We compared sociodemographic data, morbidity, mortality, and use of health care for (1) females released from provincial prison in 2010, (2) males released from provincial prison in 2010, and (3) age-matched females in the general population...

The existing literature has shown that in Western penal systems there is often an official demand for narrative rehabilitation during treatment programs, and has criticized the requirement for a narrative change to correspond with the "judicial-correctional truth." This study is based on participant observation in a male prison in mainland China. Through a comparative lens, this paper found that offenders in Western treatment programs are required to demonstrate a change in narrative identity that is immersed in details from their personal history and from judicial discourse, whereas the Chinese penal system scrutinizes individuality less and focuses more on adherence to a unified narrative form and structure...

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to identify female Hansen's disease experience in settlement village in Korea. METHOD: For this study, 11 participants in settlement village were purposively chosen. Data were collected through in-depth individual interviews from July to December 2015. Verbatim transcripts were analyzed following Colaizzi's phenomenological analysis to uncover the meaning of the experiences of the participants. RESULTS: The study results showed that female Hansen's disease experience in settlement village consisted of 9 theme and 4 theme clusters: 1) Inescapable shackles; 2) Suffered as if being in prison,; 3) In no position to be a woman or a mother; 4) Another hometown...

BACKGROUND: In 1990, Latin American countries committed to psychiatric reforms including psychiatric bed removals. Aim of the study was to quantify changes in psychiatric bed numbers and prison population rates after the initiation of psychiatric reforms in Latin America. METHODS: We searched primary sources to collect numbers of psychiatric beds and prison population rates across Latin America between the years 1991 and 2017. Changes of psychiatric bed numbers were compared against trends of incarceration rates and tested for associations using fixed-effects regression of panel data...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

: The imposition of new regulations can send industries scrambling to comply, fostering innovation in doing so. How we police and treat people with opioid use disorder (OUD), with recent widespread social unrest in reaction to police violence and systemic racism bringing the need for lasting structural changes to our justice system and social services into especially acute relief. Arbitrary laws and counterproductive policies previously subject to only incremental reform have given way to sweeping changes: people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes have been released from jails and prisons, the enforcement of drug laws has been cast aside as a priority, and the regulations surrounding addiction treatment medications and treating patients with OUD have been greatly loosened...

Although there are effective treatments that promote recovery and improve quality of life for serious mental illness in nonincarcerated populations, more research is needed to understand the recovery process for individuals with a history of incarceration. A qualitative, grounded theory study was conducted with 17 men and women who have serious mental illness (SMI) and a history of incarceration. Findings revealed barriers and facilitators to the recovery process in the areas of identity, treatment, relationships, community, and institutions...