Amid all the talk recently (has it been forever?) about health-care reform and the groups who should be covered—and who shouldn’t—I haven’t heard much discussion about health-care plans for prisoners.
That’s because folks on Capitol Hill are hesitant to talk about prison and prisoners unless they’re running for office and promoting get-tough-on-crime policies or, on the state level, being forced to cut burgeoning corrections budgets to keep from going broke.
But they should talk about it, because the 2.3 million Americans currently locked up in correctional facilities across the country suffer a much higher rate of serious and chronic illness than the general population does—from AIDS to drug addictions to a recent outbreak of a flesh-eating bacteria reported in the Tamms Correctional Center, a supermax prison, in Illinois.
Perhaps lawmakers have forgotten that the Eighth Amendment mandates that inmates have access to the same level of health care available to residents in a community. Forgotten, too, that because prisoners are in our custody, they are our responsibility and that makes them part of the discussion on health-care reform. A recent article in the Washington Post described the collateral cost of ignoring health care for one segment of the U.S. prison population—the mentally ill, who make up one-half of those incarcerated. Unable to access treatment in their communities, many mentally ill individuals get into trouble with the law, get arrested and go to prison, where they are often targets of abuse and where they certainly don’t receive any treatment for their illness.
And so when they eventually get released, the cycle of crime, arrest, incarceration starts all over again. A cycle that costs U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars annually.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Andrew P. Wilper, M.D., a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who has studied how U.S. prisons administer health care to inmates, has argued that devoting more resources to community-based mental and substance-abuse health-care centers could, by helping to keep these individuals in their right mind, reduce crime and incarceration rates.
So, by providing decent medical care, we could lower prison populations, decrease crime and improve the health of hundreds of thousands of incarcerated Americans. Sounds like a good idea, even if it weren’t already the law.
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World Vision Workers Killed
By: Kristine Steakley|Published: March 11, 2010 1:31 PM
Pray for the families of several Pakistani employees of World Vision who were killed in an attack on their office Wednesday. And pray for other aid organizations to step into the gap while World Vision pulls out of the area for a time. READ FULL ARTICLE »
How appropriate
By: Gina Dalfonzo|Published: March 11, 2010 12:01 PM
By: Gina Dalfonzo|Published: March 11, 2010 11:26 AM
Some of us Pointers are having trouble logging in: When we try to do it, we're taken to a "log out" page instead. The team is working on squashing that bug now. In the meantime, if this happens to you, refreshing the page should get you where you need to be. READ FULL ARTICLE »
Spanish Pro-Lifers Protest Abortion Law
By: Billy Atwell|Published: March 11, 2010 9:29 AM
It looks as though Spain is hearing a similar call to that in the Manhattan Declaration. A new law in Spain allows women as young as 16 to have an abortion until the 14th week of pregnancy. Pro-lifers are not taking this lightly, as demonstrated by the nearly 1,000,000 people who convened for the International March for Life 2010. God bless those advocates!
By: Kathryn Wiley|Published: March 10, 2010 3:36 PM
I'm glad to see that the New York Review of Books has a more grown-up take on the pervasive and pernicious practice of prison rape than the Oscars did. (Warning: Disturbing descriptions.)
By: Roberto Rivera|Published: March 10, 2010 1:16 PM
Let's play "Terry Mattingly," shall we? The New York Timestells us that Muslim attacks on Christians in Nigeria were "apparently in reprisal for similar attacks on Muslims in January." However, the story doesn't tell us a blessed thing about those alleged "similar attacks." How many did they kill? What were the circumstances? Why did Christian Beroms attack Fulani herders? Nada, zip, bupkes.
By: Kim Moreland|Published: March 10, 2010 11:10 AM
Sociologist Robert Wuthnow says one in five previously churched (18 to 29 year olds) has stopped attending church. A major reason for the shift is that these adults (or quasi-adults) are marrying later.
Another problem is that while the church youth groups keep their young parishioners busy doing youthy things, the pastors are neglecting to inculcate them with “in-depth” biblical teaching.
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