B: Prison and Jail
3: The costs of providing health care to inmates are substantial. [4]
Current national expenditures for health services for individuals housed in US prisons and jails are nearly six billion dollars per year. [1] California alone spent nearly one billion dollars (about one-sixth of its total corrections budget) on health services for its 160,000 inmates in the 2002-03 fiscal year, nearly doubling its correctional health care costs from 1999. [2] According to the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, violence is a public health problem, and as such the cost of proper health care is a necessary expense to prevent, detect, and treat serious illnesses among prisoners and to maintain a lawful and safe environment within correctional institutions and the nation at large. [3] However, the "value added" of these substantial expenditures on correctional health care can be achieved only if the efforts of in-prison health care providers are sustained as individuals return to the community.
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National Commission on Correctional Health Care, CorrectCare 17, no. 30 (2003).
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Evan Halper, "Inmates' Medical Tab Nears $1Billion," Los Angeles Times, June 2, 2004.
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Position statement of the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (on Correctional Health Care and the Prevention of Violence). Available online at www.ncchc.org (accessed on August 10, 2004).
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