Health Disparities for Incarcerated Women

As an Urban and Community Health major, I am profoundly interested in health disparities that exist based on race and gender (and class by extension). This semester I did my senior seminar researching incarcerated women and their access to health care.

Mass incarceration is a problem in America that disproportionately targets ethnic minorities (primarily Latinos and African-Americans) due to the “War on Drugs” campaign from the 1970s and 1980s. When one thinks of mass incarceration, the image of a young Black male is often what comes to mind, however this is an issue that affects women as well. Not many people know this, but women are actually the fastest growing population in the prison system, despite the fact that men make up the majority of the incarcerated population. Because of this, women and their needs are often overlooked and neglected by prison administrators.

Since women are a smaller demographic in the prison system, there are fewer prisons available and they are often located in geographically isolated locations that are far from urban centers, where they might have family and a social support system. As a result of being far away, they have severely limited access to some of the resources that might be available if they were located closer to an urban city, such as substance abuse treatment, good health care, and a qualified medical staff. Prisons often don’t have the money or resources to offer competitive salaries to their medical staff, especially since they are away from metropolitan areas. As a result, these women receive inadequate medical care from professionally trained health providers. Sometimes as a way to save even more money, the prisons use virtual resources where the doctor will “visit” with a patient through a video chat program.

Since the majority of women in prison are African-American, and from low-income families/communities, the need to provide good health care is very pertinent and contributes to other issues that are prevalent in our country, such as welfare, job discrimination, and types of health care the women have access to when they are released from prison and return to the outside world.