Health and Illness in Prison Community

The paper “Health and Illness in Prison Community” is a good example of a case study on nursing. The prison population in the United States can be described as one of the vulnerable groups that have continued to experience increased inequities in a whole range of issues, from lack of access to primary health care to minimal referrals for mental health conditions (Wilper et al., 2009).Health and Illness in Prison Community As demonstrated by these authors, the prisoners’ access to health care and the quality of that care in American jail systems are often underprovided in spite of the fact that incarcerated individuals have a constitutional right to healthcare which is guaranteed in the Eighth Amendment. This paper provides a perception of health and illness among the community of prisoners incarcerated at Larry D. Smith Correctional Facility in Riverside County, California. It is indeed clear that these prisoners continue to lack adequate medical and mental health services to deal with problems of drug abuse and addiction (Mineau, 2014). Available literature demonstrates that “the prison population of the United States has quadrupled in the past 25 years and the country now incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation” (Wilper et al., 2009, p. 666). These authors further acknowledge that nearly 2.3 million individuals (or 750 per 100000 people) are being held in U.S. jails and must depend on federal, state or local prison systems for health care. Larry D. Smith Correctional Facility has a capacity to hold 1,500 prisoners, with documented statistics demonstrating that Riverside County’s five correctional facilities normally process an estimated 60,000 prisoners a year (McCarthy, 2012).