AIM To assess whether the introduction of a prison-based opioid substitution therapy (OST) policy was associated with a reduction in drug-related deaths (DRD) within 14 days after prison release. DESIGN Linkage of Scotland's prisoner database with death registrations to compare periods before (1996-2002) and after (2003-07) prison-based OST was introduced. SETTING All Scottish prisons. PA...

PURPOSE This paper aims to discuss some of the obstacles to implementing policy and strategy related to health promoting prisons. It focuses on the role of prison officers and raises issues concerning their conditions of service, training and organisational culture in a situation where the prison system faces security issues, overcrowding and high levels of ill health among prisoners. DESIGN/...

At yearend 2001 there were 1,319,000 adults confined in State or Federal prison and an estimated 4,299,000 living former prisoners. A total of 5,618,000 U.S. adult residents, or about 1 in every 37 U.S. adults, had ever served time in prison. Estimates of the prevalence of imprisonment in the U.S. population, presented here for the first time, are based on a demographic model incorporating rate...

Criminologists and correctional practitioners worry that prisons encourage criminal behavior among inmates, i.e., that prisons are criminogenic. The current study analyzed a subset of the experimental data collected by Berk, Ladd, Graziano, and Baek (2003) to test a new inmate classification system in California and demonstrated that this effect does not necessarily exist. There were 561 male i...

The rapidly expanding population of prison inmates has severely challenged the prison system's ability to effectively screen incoming inmates for mental disorders and mental health service needs. This study describes a comprehensive mental health screening of inmates at a maximum security prison, using a modified version of the Referral Decision Scale (RDS), a screening measure developed from ...

A profile of the personal and professional characteristics of the physicians who work in America's prisons was obtained by analyzing data from a larger study of all licensed physicians in the United States who worked in a prison at least 12 hours a month during the fall of 1979. Psychiatrists were not included, nor were physicians working in jails. The population of 382 prison physicians compri...

BACKGROUND Positive attitudes towards prisoners are important in securing the effectiveness of various correctional rehabilitation programs and the successful reintegration of prisoners after release. We wanted to investigate the attitudes towards prisoners among prison inmates, prison employees and college students. METHODS The Attitudes Toward Prisoners scale was completed by 298 inmates in...

BACKGROUND Rates of tuberculosis (TB) transmission in prisons are reported to be high worldwide. However, a recent systematic review identified only 19 published studies reporting TB incidence in prisons, most of them from the last century and only one from sub-Saharan Africa. OBJECTIVES To assess the persisting risk of smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) among prison populations bene...

OBJECTIVES To describe and evaluate a pilot methadone maintenance program for heroin-dependent inmates of Las Malvinas men's prison in San Juan, Puerto Rico. METHODS Data from self-report of inmates' drug use before and during incarceration, attitudes about drug treatment in general and methadone maintenance in particular, and expectations about behaviors upon release from prison and from tes...

This article deals with prison library services in Italy, highlighting national and regional developments over the last twenty-five to thirty years. The article is divided into six parts: (1) a brief history of Italian prison libraries; (2) the structure and organization of the first institutional libraries (in Turin, Rome, Padua, Ravenna, Milan, Treviso, and Sardinia); (3) considerations by th...