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Scholars discuss the lack of uniform standards for health care provided behind bars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Only one group of people in the United States has a constitutional right to health care\u2014the incarcerated.<\/p>\n
In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled<\/a> that depriving incarcerated individuals of reasonably adequate medical care violates the Eighth Amendment\u2019s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But who decides what is reasonably adequate?<\/p>\n The answer is not so clear. Multiple agencies at federal, state, and local levels possess<\/a> authority over correctional health care. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) oversees<\/a> the provision of medical, dental, and mental health services in federal prisons. The vast majority of the incarcerated, however, are held<\/a> in state prisons and county jails, where standards vary<\/a> by state and by county.<\/p>\n Some facilities are accredited by private organizations such as the National Commission on Correctional Health Care<\/a> (NCCHC), which requires compliance with certain process and quality measures. But this accreditation process remains<\/a> entirely voluntary, leaving the correctional health care system without a uniform set of standards.<\/p>\n This lack of mandatory standards or oversight has led<\/a> to pervasive inadequate care. One study found<\/a> that among incarcerated individuals with a persistent medical problem, 20 percent of those in state facilities and 68 percent of those in local jails went without care. Prison medical staff also commonly fail to perform<\/a> routine gynecological exams, to screen<\/a> for prevalent infectious diseases, or to administer<\/a> prescribed medications. Few prisons provide<\/a> comprehensive medication-assisted treatment for people with substance use disorder, despite the high prevalence of the condition found<\/a> among the incarcerated.<\/p>\n Some activists attribute<\/a> this pattern of inadequate care to increasing privatization, as states seek<\/a> to constrain rising correctional health care costs. In an ongoing class-action lawsuit in Arizona, incarcerated individuals allege<\/a> that the state\u2019s private health care contractor has provided \u201cgrossly inadequate\u201d care that has led to preventable injury, disfigurement, and death. The facilities at issue in the case are<\/a> NCCHC accredited, casting doubt on the efficacy of the current accreditation process.<\/p>\n Nearly 2 million individuals are currently incarcerated<\/a>, 800,000 of whom have<\/a> a chronic medical condition. In an era of mass incarceration, the substandard state of the correctional health care system has a profound impact.<\/p>\n In this week\u2019s Saturday Seminar, experts discuss how increased regulation can protect the constitutional right of incarcerated people to receive adequate health care.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Saturday\u00a0Seminar\u00a0is a weekly feature that aims to put into written form the kind of\u00a0content that would be conveyed in a live\u00a0seminar\u00a0involving regulatory experts. Each week,\u00a0The Regulatory Review<\/i>\u00a0publishes a brief overview of a selected regulatory topic and then distills recent research and scholarly writing on that topic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n