Mass incarceration and the decline in U.S. life expectancy.
The United States has the largest prison population in the world with over 2 million people incarcerated.
Life expectancy in the U.S. fell by 2.7 years from 2019 to 2021 and continues to fall.
Is there a connection between these two facts?
Probably.
According to data from the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project, at least 6,182 people died in state and federal prisons in 2020, a 46% jump from the previous year.
The U.S. has seen a significant, continual increase in deaths in prisons over the past two decades, but never before have the country’s prisons seen such a steep increase year-to-year.
Since the U.S. has the largest incarcerated population in the world, keeps people in prison longer and has seen a huge jump in prison mortality rates, is it crazy to suggest that there is a link between mass incarceration and the nation’s declining life expectancy?
There is a definite connection.
Even after being released from prison, the experience of incarceration creates huge societal health issues.
Thousands of people are released from prisons and jails every year with conditions such as cancer, heart disease, and infectious diseases they developed while incarcerated. The issue hits hard in Alabama, Louisiana, and other Southeastern states, which have some of the highest incarceration rates in the nation.
Source: https://www.sentencingproject.org
I think about this in light of the recent developments in Chicago.
Paul Vallas ran a losing campaign for mayor on a tough-on-crime platform. While Vallas happily lost, we were only 20,000 votes short of having to endure Vallas as mayor for the next four years.
Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx was elected six years ago on a platform of criminal justice reform. She made Cook County the nation’s capital for overturning false convictions.
Under constant attack, Foxx announced last week - two years before the next election - that she will not run for a third term.
In 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic the NY Times reported:
The jail in Chicago is now the nation’s largest-known source of coronavirus infections, according to data compiled by The New York Times, with more confirmed cases than the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., or the cluster centered on New Rochelle, N.Y.
The Cook County Sheriff’s Office, which operates the jail, said Wednesday that 238 inmates and 115 staff members had tested positive for the virus. But those figures most likely downplay the actual problem, the jail acknowledged, because the vast majority of the jail’s 4,500 inmates have not been tested.
From the Journal of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which suggests that these conditions have a great impact on the wider population outside of prison.
Life expectancy is worse in the US than in most other high-income countries and has some of the widest disparities across race and class. The experience of incarceration, which is linked to numerous ill health effects, may contribute to racial health disparities and to the relatively poor health of the population as a whole. A variety of mechanisms may explain this connection to health, from the stressful disruption of detention and release, to the enduring effects of stigma, decreased earning potential, frayed social bonds, and other challenges that persist long after a person returns home.
No one seems to be considering the destructive effects of stress and the ways in which the criminal justice system stresses people. Stress shortens lifespans. At one point I had a successful program to directly reduce this problem.
I used to be my agency's liaison with Illinois Department of Corrections. I would make regular trips to the State's prisons, have regular meetings with local parole officers. I knew how to deal with the system, and I knew something about the problems which led to criminal behavior and which militated against its remediation. I also managed one of my agency's three regional offices.
One of my staff ran a job club. Her brother was an habitual offender, so she was motivated to do something about the problem of crime.
I gave her carte blanch. I told her, "Set up your program, request what you need, tell me if anyone is making problems. Tell me, and I will fix it."
She went to work and put together her dream program. The usual recidivism rate for offenders was 75%. My staff member shoehorned people into jobs, real jobs with a future. They were followed up on to make sure they wouldn't screw up. After the first year operating our program, we were working with substantial numbers of offenders. Our recidivism rate was only 10 %.
Every few weeks, I would personally go out to see how our offenders were doing. I would visit them in their work places
We kept that up for three or four years. We kept recidivism down to 10%. We could document every one of our outcomes. The whole thing was evidence based, data driven.
Then there was a shift in political power. Bill Clinton and the neoliberals got in. One of the first things they did? They shut down our program and everything like it.
Why?
Because we weren't market based. The ideology of neoliberalism worships markets. We were turning criminal offenders into taxpayers, members of their communities. But we weren't market based. That was the wrong approach, we were told. We should have been lecturing our ex offenders about market competitiveness. We shouldn't have done anything for them.
So we had to shut down our ex offenser's program.
Another point. What people forget is that crime doesn't start with the actual offense. It starts with schools that don't work, with endemic poverty, and with governments who think their function is to export jobs, not employ their people.
Policies like this create stress. The health disparities begin in impoverished neighborhood. The criminal justice system simply magnifies the disparities.