The Associated Press released an article last week titled “Treating Prisoners While Jailed Could Stop Disease” claiming just that. Diseases like AIDS, hepatitis, mental illnesses and tuberculosis are statistically more prevalent in the ten million incarcerated people worldwide, two million of whom are in the United States. Therefore, according to the Seena Fazel of the University of Oxford and Jacques Baillargeon of the University of Texas Medical Branch, whose review of prisoner’s health in the western world was published in the medical journal Lancet, treating prisoners could only prove to be advantages in stopping health problems before they hit the public.
The idea that the incarcerated population of the world is absolutely isolated is unrealistic. Figures from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), a non-profit organization providing information and analysis on capital punishment since 1990, put the total number of executions since 1976 in the US at 1,233. Of the remaining prisoners about 1 in 10 are serving life sentences. Even taking into account the number of people who die before completing their sentence, that still leaves a significant portion that will eventually be released into the public. These numbers support the notion that what happens in prison affects the outside world as well.
The World Health Organization advises governments to provide prisoners with the best possible health care free of charge, even when countries are strapped for cash. The U.N. has also released a statement on the treatment of prisoners saying that they should have access to health services without discrimination. But why? Putting aside the argument that it’s for our own benefit, I believe that there is something to be said about human rights and prisoners. The vast majority of the two million prisoners in the United States are not cold-blooded murders. In fact, they generally do not set out to break the law just for the thrill of doing so. It is usually to help a struggling single parent, to pay for medical bills, to feed their families, or just in the spur of the moment. Keeping that in mind, I don’t believe that taking away human rights as a consequence of breaking the law is justified. Instead, we should not underestimate the power of correctional education, advocated for by the likes of Anton Makareno, a renowned Ukranian educational theorist. Because people can indeed change, and they do. For me it is clear that if we can enjoy good health, then prisoners should too. Another debate, however, lies in whether or not prisoners deserve free health care in countries where universal health care is not instituted.
2 comments:
I agree with you that, “even taking into account the number of people who die before completing their sentence, that still leaves a significant portion that will eventually be released into the public,” which makes it clear that we cannot avoid treating those in prison. However, at the same time, I do not agree that they deserve to get automatic free healthcare especially “when countries are strapped for cash.” I feel as though, if a country is incapable of supplying its own law-abiding occupants with free healthcare, then there should be no reason to supply its non law-abiding occupants with free healthcare.
Perhaps the World Health Organization wishes to mandate that incarcerated persons be given free healthcare because of the fact that diseases pass more frequently between inmates and if these people are to be released they will continue to pass on disease that could’ve been terminated earlier. Even with this in mind I think there is still the issue of what is ethically fair. There are far more people who are not in prison who do not receive healthcare in comparison to the number of people in prison who could potentially receive healthcare— and so it would seem logical to benefit the majority rather than the minority. It’s almost like we’d be rewarding those who were in prison. If however, a government had a surplus of money I see no reason not to give healthcare to those who were sure to exit prison in the near future.
I actually wrote about this exact topic last week (eh ehm), but I wanted to respond to Grace's comment. When you say that the majority would not be helped if aid is given to the prisoners, this fails to take into account a few details. This free healthcare is not a suggestion solely because the prisoners have higher rates of disease, it is in a large part due to the fact that their release from prison puts a large population (the majority) at risk of being infected by these diseases. What I tried to explain in my post about this same issue was that the burdened societies, the poor, will be the ones who suffer from the lack of effective healthcare in prisons. This is because prisoners generally come from poor backgrounds, so they will be released back into poor society and will be a danger to the people who reside in them. But yes, some people outside of prison do indeed need healthcare very badly, but so many people have the potential to be affected if prison inmates go untreated.
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