Resource spotlight: Handbook on health and punishment tackles carceral health, featuring original analysis from Prison Policy Initiative
by Leah Wang, December 20, 2024
At the Prison Policy Initiative, we are often cited in academic articles and advocacy materials, but for the first time, we’ve published our own standalone chapter in an academic collection of critical essays and original research. The American Society of Criminology’s (ASC) Division on Corrections and Sentencing, one of several professional groups within ASC, has just published the ninth volume of its Handbook, with a theme of contemporary issues in health and punishment.1 This 800-page behemoth is a goldmine for people interested in how the criminal legal system intersects and interacts with physical, mental, and public health. Our own chapter offers “An Overview of Health and Access to Healthcare for People in State Prisons.”
Many other divisions of ASC publish an academic journal as a contribution to the field, but this division’s Handbook is a unique product that curates the very best in recent scholarship — including critical policy recommendations. The editors of this particular volume also sought insights from people with lived experience, practitioners, policy advocates, and scientists, in addition to the impressive lineup of academic researchers.
Our contribution to this edition of the Handbook is based on our original analysis of a national survey of people in state prisons, summarized in our 2022 report Chronic Punishment: The unmet health needs of people in state prisons. But the chapter goes further than that, explaining how people in prison access healthcare and the barriers they face, and providing an overview of our work on the flawed Medicaid and Medicare policies that exclude and punish system-impacted people. (We are pleased to report that since we wrote the chapter, there have been a few wins for system-impacted people regarding Medicaid and Medicare.)2 We conclude with recommendations to drastically increase access to healthcare services, acknowledge specific areas of need, and above all, move people out of prisons and jails permanently.
The interdisciplinary topics of health and punishment allowed the Handbook’s other authors to showcase their expertise on gender, aging, public health policy, social determinants of health, environmental justice, and more. As a result, the Handbook is an invaluable resource for readers from a wide range of fields, from criminal justice to public health, sociology, medicine, ethics, law, and policy. In the words of Dr. Homer Venters, who wrote one of the Handbook’s closing chapters, this volume offers “a sober understanding of the deep and systemic failures in our national system of mass incarceration.”
We’re delighted to be in the literary company of professors, practitioners, and advocates whose work we admire and rely on as we examine the far-reaching impacts of mass incarceration. You can learn more about the Division or the Handbook here.
Footnotes
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Previous volumes of the ASC Division on Correction and Sentencing Handbook have focused on sentencing policy, pretrial justice, and collateral consequences, among other topics. Each volume can be purchased as a hard copy or an e-book from the publisher’s website. ↩
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In November 2024, the federal government approved an important new rule that makes people on community supervision (probation, parole, supervised on bail, or living in a halfway house) eligible to receive Medicare benefits. A year prior, Medicare expanded its enrollment period, undoing the rule requiring incarcerated people to enroll in and pay premiums for Medicare coverage while still incarcerated — a time when they’re excluded from benefits. As for Medicaid, states are increasingly taking advantage of federal 1115 waiver demonstrations, which can provide pre-release Medicaid coverage for people nearing their release from jail or prison (among other expansion efforts). ↩
