by the University of Michigan
ANN ARBOR, Michigan.— More people live behind bars in the U.S. than in any other country, and this system also punishes the health of the friends and loved ones left behind.
In the first known study of its kind, University of Michigan researchers found that people with a family member or friend in prison suffer worse physical and mental health, more stress and depressive symptoms, and that those symptoms worsen the closer the relationship to the person incarcerated.
The study results could help explain health disparities between minorities and whites, said Daniel Kruger, U-M Research Professor at the School of Public Health and lead researcher on the study. African Americans are both more likely to know someone incarcerated, Kruger said, and they also report feeling closer to the person incarcerated than whites do. “It’s like a double whammy,” he said. Forty-nine percent of blacks reported a friend or relative in prison during the past five years compared to just 20 percent of whites.
Those who knew someone incarcerated had 40 percent more days where poor physical health interfered with their usual activities, including work, and 54 percent more days where poor mental or emotional health interfered with these activities, Kruger said.
Others have examined the health effects of incarceration on inmates and a few studies have investigated the health of children whose mothers are incarcerated. But those studies focused on people already in the system, Kruger said.
“We actually took a representative sample of people in the community and asked them whether they had a friend or relative incarcerated in the last five years,” Kruger said.
“We also included a powerful array of known health predictors as control variables.”
For instance, the researchers considered whether a person smoked tobacco, drank alcohol heavily, was overweight or obese, and had adequate nutrition and physical exercise.
The study consisted of 1288 adults from Flint, Michigan, an urban area with high unemployment and crime rates, and surrounding areas of Genesee County. In the study, 67 percent of respondents were white and 26 percent African American.
“Our study demonstrates that incarceration is not only enormously expensive economically, it also has public health costs and these should be taken into consideration,” Kruger said. “In the last 30 years or so we have seen a more and more punitive system, one where judges no longer have discretion for sentencing.”
Moving towards a rehabilitation model may benefit both the offending individuals and society. “The vast majority of people incarcerated are non-violent drug offenders, we should shift oversight of substance use and abuse to the health care sector.”
One out of every 100 adults in the U.S. is in jail or prison, and more than three times as many Blacks and Latinos live in jails or prisons than college dorms, Kruger said.
This particular study looked only at Blacks, not Latinos, because there is not a large enough population of Hispanics in Flint and Genesee County.
The paper, “The Association of Incarceration with Community Health and Racial Health Disparities,” will appear in the April issue of Progress in Community Health Partnerships.
