Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2006 Oct;96(10):1762-5.
doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2005.081760.

Incarceration as forced migration: effects on selected community health outcomes

James C Thomas  1 , Elizabeth Torrone
Affiliations

Incarceration as forced migration: effects on selected community health outcomes

James C Thomas et al. Am J Public Health. 2006 Oct.

Abstract

Objectives: We estimated the effects of high incarceration rates on rates of sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies.

Methods: We calculated correlations between rates of incarceration in state prisons and county jails and rates of sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies for each of the 100 counties in North Carolina during 1995 to 2002. We also estimated increases in negative health outcomes associated with increases in incarceration rates using negative binomial regression analyses.

Results: Rates of sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies, adjusted for age, race, and poverty distributions by county, consistently increased with increasing incarceration rates. In the most extreme case, teenage pregnancies exhibited an increase of 71.61 per 100000 population (95% confidence interval [CI]=41.88, 101.35) in 1996 after an increase in the prison population rate from 223.31 to 468.58 per 100000 population in 1995.

Conclusions: High rates of incarceration can have the unintended consequence of destabilizing communities and contributing to adverse health outcomes.

PubMed Disclaimer

Republished in

References

    1. Kark SL. The social pathology of syphilis in Africans. S Afr Med J. 1949;23:77–84. - PubMed
    1. Lurie M, Harrison A, Wilkinson D, Abdool Karim SS. Circular migration and sexual networking in rural KwaZulu/Natal: implications for the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted disease. Health Transition Rev. 1997;7(suppl 3):S15–S24.
    1. Austin J, Irwin J. It’s About Time: America’s Imprisonment Binge. 3rd ed. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth/ Thompson Learning; 2001.
    1. Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance, 2000. Atlanta, Ga: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; 2001.
    1. Alan Guttmacher Institute. US teenage pregnancy statistics: overall trends, trends by race and ethnicity, and state-by-state information, New York, 2004. Available at: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/state_pregnancy_trends.pdf. Accessed July 5, 2006.

Publication types