Prisoner Health

Dear Colleagues,

Health protection in prisons and, more generally, for people deprived of their liberty is an ongoing public health challenge. Prison medicine is public medicine that, in a modern world, must involve evidence-based approaches, safeguarding the delicate balance that governments must strike between health protection and the certainty of punishment.

Prisoners' health is a discipline with cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary development, combining multiple competencies of family medicine, internal medicine, geriatrics, pneumology, cardiology, physiotherapy and rehabilitation, psychology, criminology (forensic psychiatry), toxicology and legal medicine; it requires a comprehensive and strategic approach aimed at prevention and screenings.

Prisoners should have access to the same standards of medical care as people living in the community. While free citizens often have the choice of where to go to receive care, prisoners benefit from what the government is able to offer: for this reason, care inside prisons must be managed with punctuality and consideration, always respecting specific organizational models.

Criminal justice systems, prison services, and resources vary widely from country to country; however, international organizations recommend that governments ensure the health protection of prisoners, whether they are in temporary custody or in permanent detention. The WHO strongly recommends that prison and public healthcare should always be intimately linked due to the high prevalence of prisoners with serious illnesses who, once free, could bring untreated diseases into the free community.

Prison health workers and those working in correctional facilities are aware of the many obstacles to providing standard quality care within these facilities as the environment presents unique difficulties.

However, healthcare professionals involved in providing care in prison and secure settings are aware of the many obstacles to quality care within these settings, as the environment presents unique difficulties for both inmates and healthcare personnel to manage.

The most obvious difficulty is the inadequacy of doctor–patient relationships due to the prison setting, which does not allow this relationship to be maintained: this is a critical issue that affects both therapeutic management and penal enforcement.

Areas for improvement that ensure a healthy prison environment include epidemiological investigations, clinical management, the design and implementation of care pathways, nutrition, inmate mortality, prison life, relations with the justice system, and clinical risk management.

In order to achieve full health protection, aspects related to physical suffering from assault, injury from wrongful compulsion or wrongful imprisonment, and death in custody are also relevant.

The need to continuously improve the mental and physical health of prisoners should undoubtedly be a priority for all governments.

Given the relevance of this, the journal Healthcare is launching a Special Issue that focuses on and discusses all aspects of this complex topic, collecting original investigations, case series and case reports, and reviews in all branches of medicine, clinical toxicology, pharmacology, psychiatry, rehabilitation, legal medicine and criminology (forensic psychiatry).

This Special Issue primarily aims to provide an overview of health research pathways in prisons and protected environments, including emerging perspectives such as gender, precision medicine, and AI interface as potential implementation strategies in such environments. Similar contributions dealing with clinical and forensic aspects of other sciences and social sciences, as well as contributions related to valuable emerging scientific disciplines, are also welcome. In this Special Issue, original research articles, reviews, and case reports are sought.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Giulio Di Mizio
Guest Editor

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• prison health systems across the world
• risk factors for health
• prison environment
• prison healthcare systems and governance
• inmate and mental illness
• rehabilitation in mental illness
• rehabilitation of prisoners
• inmates and infectious diseases
• drugs and/in prison
• disabled prisoners
• prison workers and their protection
• prison medicine
• COVID-19 and prison
• feeding in prison
• medical responsibility in penitentiary medicine
• clinical risk management in penitentiary medicine
• compatibility of the prisoner's health conditions with imprisonment
• suicidal risk assessment in prison
• CSI in prison
• inmate autopsy
• innovative methods of expert investigation in prison and of prisoners
• torture in prison: medico-legal investigation
• medical liability in prison medicine
• precision medicine in prison
• clinical pathways in prison
• artificial intelligence in prison healthcare
• telemedicine in prison healthcare