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Although incarceration may have life-long negative health effects, little is known about associations between child incarceration and subsequent adult health outcomes. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors analyzed data from 14,689 adult participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to compare adult health outcomes among those first incarcerated between 7 and 13 years of age (child incarceration); first incarcerated at>or=14 years of age; and never incarcerated.

Compared to the other two groups, those with a history of child incarceration were disproportionately black or Hispanic, male, and from lower socio-economic strata. Additionally, individuals incarcerated as children had worse adult health outcomes, including general health, functional limitations (climbing stairs), depressive symptoms, and suicidality, than those first incarcerated at older ages or never incarcerated.

Despite the limitations of the secondary database analysis, these findings suggest that incarcerated children are an especially medically vulnerable population.

Programs and policies that address these medically vulnerable children’s health needs through comprehensive health and social services in place of, during, and/or after incarceration are needed.

Meeting these unmet health and social service needs offers an important opportunity to achieve necessary health care and justice reform for children.

No prior studies have examined the longitudinal relationship between child incarceration and adult health outcomes.

Despite the existence of minimum age laws for juvenile justice jurisdiction in 18 US states, California has no explicit law that protects children (i.e. youth less than 12 years old) from being processed in the juvenile justice system. In the absence of a minimum age law, California lags behind other states and international practice and standards. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this policy brief, academics across the University of California campuses examine current evidence, theory, and policy related to the minimum age of juvenile justice jurisdiction.

Existing evidence suggests that children lack the cognitive maturity to comprehend or benefit from formal juvenile justice processing, and diverting children from the system altogether is likely to be more beneficial for the child and for public safety.

Based on current evidence and theory, the authors argue that minimum age legislation that protects children from contact with the juvenile justice system and treats them as children in need of services and support, rather than as delinquents or criminals, is an important policy goal for California and for other national and international jurisdictions lacking a minimum age law.

California has no law specifying a minimum age for juvenile justice jurisdiction, meaning that young children of any age can be processed in the juvenile justice system. This policy brief provides a rationale for a minimum age law in California and other states and jurisdictions without one.

This study aims to characterize the June 2020 COVID-19 outbreak at San Quentin California State Prison and to describe what made San Quentin so vulnerable to uncontrolled transmission.

Since its onset, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated the profound health harms of carceral settings, such that nearly half of state prisons reported COVID-19 infection rates that were four or more times (and up to 15 times) the rate found in the state’s general population. Thus, addressing the public health crises and inequities of carceral settings during a respiratory pandemic requires analyzing the myriad factors shaping them. In this study, we reported observations and findings from environmental risk assessments during visits to San Quentin California State Prison. We complemented our assessments with analyses of administrative data.

For future respiratory pathogens that cannot be prevented with effective vaccines, this study argues that outbreaks will no doubt occur again without robust implementation of additional levels of preparedness – improved ventilation, air filtration, decarceration with emergency evacuation planning – alongside addressing the vulnerabilities of carceral settings themselves.

This study addresses two critical aspects that are insufficiently covered in the literature: how to prepare processes to safely implement emergency epidemic measures when needed, such as potential evacuation, and how to address unique challenges throughout an evolving pandemic for each carceral setting.

This paper aims to describe the process to create an inventory of the facilities in Canada designated to incarcerate women and girls, health service responsibility by facility, facility proximity to hospitals with maternity services and residential programmes for mothers and children to stay together. This paper creates the inventory to support health researchers, prison rights advocates and policymakers to identify, analyse and respond to sex and gender differences in health and access to health services in prisons.

In spring 2019, this study conducted an environmental scan to create an inventory of every facility in Canada designated for the incarceration of girls and women, including remand/pretrial custody, immigration detention, youth facilities and for provincial and federal sentences.

There are 72 facilities in the inventory. In most, women are co-located with men. Responsibility for health varies by jurisdiction. Few sites have mother-child programmes. Distance to maternity services varies from 1 to 132 km.

This paper did not include police lock-up, courthouse cells or involuntary psychiatric units in the inventory. Information is unavailable regarding trans and non-binary persons, a priority for future work. Access to maternity hospital services is but one critical question regarding reproductive care. Maintenance of the database is challenging.

Incarcerated women are an invisible population. The inventory is the first of its kind and is a useful tool to support sex and gender and health research across jurisdictions.