From Prison Policy Initiative:
While people in the United States have long struggled with cost, quality, and access to healthcare, the crisis is particularly severe for people confined in jails and prisons. Since 2000, conditions have been so bad that roughly half of all state prison systems have been court-ordered to improve mental and medical healthcare, according to our analysis of data from The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.
Alabama prisons have been hit with six healthcare-related court orders in that time — more than any other state — followed by California (5) and Colorado, Connecticut, New York, and Wisconsin (3 each). These court orders cover a wide range of healthcare issues, including insufficient policies, understaffing, failure to provide medication and treatments, and lack of quality monitoring and reporting; they paint a frightening picture of the scale of the problem facing incarcerated people. But lawsuits are an extremely limited metric by which to judge the quality of correctional healthcare: it’s very difficult for incarcerated people to successfully sue over their conditions, and many people endure medical neglect and abuse that never makes it before a judge. In other words, the reality is almost certainly worse.
Read the full report here.
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