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In this chapter, I address how criminal justice policies, and discrimination and prejudice within the US criminal justice system, negatively affect trans men. By focusing on trans men’s unique incarceration experiences using 15 in-depth interviews, I recommend four key policy changes for correctional facilities: (1) allow trans men to choose the gender of the correctional facility in which they are housed; (2) allow trans men to wear undergarments that align with their gender identity; (3) provide trans men access to trans-appropriate healthcare; and (4) implement harsher penalties for non-compliance of Prison Rape Elimination Act Standards. These four policies would improve the life chances of trans men during their incarceration and post-incarceration.

Purpose – Prison health is public health. Yet, efforts to protect against as well as slow the spread of COVID-19 are virtually impossible in prison settings where “what we know” may not match with policies. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, incarcerated people are uniquely at risk as correctional facilities are “super-spreader” sites for prisoners and staff alike. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the impact of COVID-19 in prisons along with the additional personal and social costs associated with the pandemic (e.g., lockdowns, limited visitation, etc.) that can also impact the health status of those “doing COVID time.”

Methodology/Approach – This chapter examines the multifaceted impact of the COVID pandemic on those (in)directly impacted in correctional settings. It is not an empirical work.

Originality/Value – This chapter provides insight into the often taken-for-granted impact of the COVID pandemic on those who live and work in prison settings. The recommendations may be of interest to those who “do the time,” those who work in such settings, and social justice advocates and others involved in policy-making.

Purpose – This chapter gives an overview of the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on institutional corrections in the United States and the responses correctional institutions have taken to lessen those impacts.

Methodology/Approach – A review of the extant literature was conducted to gather information on COVID-19 and the institutional corrections systems within the United States.

Findings – The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on correctional institutions within the United States were more pronounced due to the demographic characteristics of inmates and facility challenges. Responses to outbreaks or potential outbreaks in jails and prisons in the United States included screening measures, restricted inmate movement and visitation, and decarceration efforts.

Originality/Value – This chapter builds upon literature by discussing the challenges posed to correctional institutions in the United States in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and summarizing the measures taken to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on inmates, institutional staff, and community members alike.

This research explores the subjective health experiences of women incarcerated in a provincial detention center in Ottawa, Canada.

Narrative interviews conducted with 16 previously incarcerated women were analyzed to explore how health issues shaped their experiences in detention.

Women identified a set of practices and conditions that negatively impacted health, including the denial of medication, medical treatment, and healthcare, limited prenatal healthcare, and damaged health caused by poor living conditions.

Findings suggest that structural health problems emerge in penal environments where healthcare is provided by the same agency responsible for incarceration. The incompatibility between the mandates of incarceration and healthcare suggests that responsibility for institutional healthcare should be transferred to provincial healthcare bodies.

This research responds to the lack of research on carceral health experiences within both penal scholarship and medical sociology, particularly in relation to women and those confined in jails.

This review integrates and builds linkages among existing theoretical and empirical literature from across disciplines to further broaden our understanding of the relationship between inequality, imprisonment, and health for black men. The review examines the health impact of prisons through an ecological theoretical perspective to understand how factors at multiple levels of the social ecology interact with prisons to potentially contribute to deleterious health effects and the exacerbation of race/ethnic health disparities.

This review finds that there are documented health disparities between inmates and non-inmates, but the casual mechanisms explaining this relationship are not well-understood. Prisons may interact with other societal systems – such as the family (microsystem), education, and healthcare systems (meso/exosystems), and systems of racial oppression (macrosystem) – to influence individual and population health.

The review also finds that research needs to move the discussion of the race effects in health and crime/justice disparities beyond the mere documentation of such differences toward a better understanding of their causes and effects at the level of individuals, communities, and other social ecologies.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on the invisible incarcerated women population who are convicted of a crime and serving a sentence in a residential correctional facility in the United States (US). Even though correctional populations have been declining in the past years, the extent of mass incarceration has been a significant public health concern even before the pandemic. Moreover, the global spread of COVID-19 continues to have devastating effects in all the world's societies, and it has exacerbated existing social inequalities within the US carceral complex.

We base our findings on data collection from two comparative clinical sociological garden interventions in a large Southeastern women's prison and a Midwestern residential community correctional facility for women. Both are residential correctional facilities for residents convicted of a crime. In contrast, in prison, women are serving longer-term sentences, and in the community corrections facility, women typically are housed for six months. We have developed and carried out educational garden programming and related research on both sites over the past two years and observe more closely the impact of COVID-19 on incarcerated women and their communities, which has aggravated the invisibility and marginalization of incarcerated women who suffered a lack of programming and insufficient research attention already before the pandemic.

We argue that prison gardens' educational programming has provided some respite from the hardships of the pandemic and is a promising avenue of correctional rehabilitation and programming that fosters sustainability, healthier nutrition, and mental health among participants.

Residential correctional facilities are distinctively sited to advance health equity and community health within a framework of sustainability, especially during a pandemic. We focus on two residential settings for convicted women serving a sentence in a prison or a residential community corrections facility that offers rehabilitation and educational programming. Women are an underserved population within the US carceral system, and it is thus essential to develop more programming and research for their benefit.

Purpose – This chapter describes the problem of and approaches to ex-inmates with psychiatric disabilities exiting correctional custody. Although all ex-inmates must find housing and employment, persons with psychiatric disabilities require linkages to various health-related services and supports. These linkages are necessary, but it is unknown whether they are sufficient because discharge planning services and transition programs for ex-inmates with psychiatric disabilities historically lack an evidence base.

Approach – After a decade, the first-generation re-entry programs for ex-inmates with psychiatric disabilities have yielded little in the way of empirical data, but they have provided models for program expansion and imperatives for second-generation program assessment. Related research findings for first- and second-generation programs are highlighted with an emphasis on a unique statewide program in Massachusetts.

Findings – A review of the first- and second-generation programs suggests that progress has been slow in identifying empirically supported best practices for this population. There is a growing evidence base that community reintegration outcomes for ex-inmates with psychiatric disabilities are the result of demographic and criminal history variations, yet implications of these variations needs further exploration in the realms of service access and receptivity as well as variations in postrelease adaptation.

Implications – More knowledge and innovative research is needed on the experience of ex-inmates with psychiatric disabilities and social integration. Resources for cost effectiveness studies as well as long-term follow-up qualitative studies are necessary.