The Health Status of Soon-To-Be-Released Inmates, volume 1

This chapter presents estimates of the prevalence of selected communicable diseases, chronic diseases, and mental illnesses among inmates in the Nation’s prisons and jails. When The Health Status of Soon-To-Be-Released Inmates project began, there appeared to be several possible methods of collecting prevalence data. The best approach would have been to interview and physically examine a statistically valid sample of inmates across the Nation. This type of survey would have been far beyond the resources available for the project. A second option would have been to abstract medical records for a sample of inmates. In addition to being expensive and complex, this approach would have potentially been invalid: because of significant differences in the information systems among correctional institutions (e.g., prisons, jails, prerelease centers, work camps), it would have been impossible to identify a sample of medical records that would have been representative of all prison inmate records.