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.