Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners

Incarcerated Populations

With more than 2 million people in jails and prisons, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Each year, more than half a million are released, of which around 70 percent will be rearrested within a year. Prisoners and ex-prisoners are more likely than the general public to have been unemployed or homeless, to not have finished high school, to have grown up in poverty or experienced trauma, to have had an incarcerated parent, to be diagnosed with mental illness, to commit suicide, to suffer from chronic and infectious disease, and to have untreated dental problems.

A small but growing number of prisoners (7 percent) and parolees (12 percent) in the United States are women with gender-specific service needs. Prisoners in U.S. jails and prisons are disproportionately black (40 percent), Latino or Latina (15 percent), and Native American (3 percent), and services must be culturally sensitive in design and delivery.

Service needs, and the challenges of providing services, differ depending on the type of institution. Jails are county or city facilities that house people awaiting adjudication or who are serving a sentence of less than one year (or in some states two years). Prisons are state facilities where people serve sentences of one year (or two years) or more. The federal system also has prisons and detention facilities.

A majority of arrestees are released from jail within 72 hours, with an average stay of 10 to 20 Days. In prisons, the average length of stay is about three years, while nearly 10 percent of prisoners are serving life sentences (30 percent of which have no possibility of parole). The service needs of and the opportunities for someone in jail for a 24-hour period will differ from those of someone in jail for one year, in prison for two years, or in prison for the rest of his or her life.

Education and Health Care

Around 80 percent of incarcerated people have not attended college, and a majority of them do not have a high school diploma. All correctional institutions offer some form of basic education (GED) and Many offer vocational training, but due to the elimination of Pell grants for prisoners in 1994, college programs are scarce. GED, college, and vocational certificate programs have all been shown to reduce recidivism.

Incarcerated people have higher rates of infectious disease including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and hepatitis. Correctional facilities are therefore an ideal place to target interventions aimed at reducing infectious diseases. Incarcerated people also have higher rates of chronic disease, including hypertension, asthma, and arthritis. Due to longer sentence lengths, including life without parole, more prisoners require care for geriatric conditions as well as end-of-life and hospice care. Given funding and security challenges, health care services in jails and prisons are often inadequate.

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