ArticleSSM - population health2021
Incarceration and mortality in the United States.
Article in SSM - population health, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- The effectiveness of non-exposure to incarceration in preventing COVID-19 and mitigating associated events: a systematic review and meta-analysis.BMC public health · 2025Pooled it
- Death by incarceration: Detention duration, overdose, and COVID-19 in Los Angeles County Jails, 2008-2023.PloS one · 2026Observational
- Incarceration and Psychiatric Emergency Department Visits Among Black Americans.The Milbank quarterly · 2025Article
- The Digital Availability of US Departments of Corrections' Research Policies: Cross-Sectional Analysis.JMIR formative research · 2025Article
- County Incarceration Rate and Stroke Death: A Cross-Sectional Study of the Influence of Physical Environment, Health Care Access, and Community Mental Distress.Journal of the American Heart Association · 2025Article
- Incidence, Patient-Directed Discharge, Readmission, and Mortality Among People Hospitalized With Injecting-Related Infection: A Population-Based Linkage Study.Open forum infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Characterizing Emergency Department Care for Patients With Histories of Incarceration.Journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians open · 2025Article
- Implementing Reform: Approaches to Alter the Use of Local Jail for People with Behavioral Health Conditions.International journal of offender therapy and comparative criminology · 2024Article
- The Distribution of Carceral Harm: County-Level Jail Incarceration and Mortality by Race, Sex, and Age.Demography · 2024Article
- Community and household-level incarceration and its association with mental health in a racially/ethnically diverse sample of families.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2024Article
- The association between incarceration and housing insecurity and advanced immune age during late life.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2024Article
- Enhancing healthcare accessibility through telehealth for justice impacted individuals.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Identifying incarceration status in the electronic health record using large language models in emergency department settings.Journal of clinical and translational science · 2024Article
- Public Health and Prisons: Priorities in the Age of Mass Incarceration.Annual review of public health · 2023Review
- Article
- Clustering of health burdens in solitary confinement: A mixed-methods approach.SSM. Qualitative research in health · 2022Article
- Invited Perspective: Uncovering Harmful Exposures in Carceral Environments.Environmental health perspectives · 2022Article
- Association of Incarceration With Mortality by Race From a National Longitudinal Cohort Study.JAMA network open · 2021Article
- Association of Jail Decarceration and Anticontagion Policies With COVID-19 Case Growth Rates in US Counties.JAMA network open · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted the role of America's overcrowded prisons as vectors of ill health, but robust analyses of the degree to which high rates of incarceration impact population-level health outcomes remain scarce. In this paper, we use county-level panel data from 2927 counties across 43 states between 1983 and 2014 and a novel instrumental variable technique to study the causal effect of penal expansion on age-standardised cause-specific and all-cause mortality rates. We find that higher rates of incarceration have substantively large effects on deaths from communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases in the short and medium term, whilst deaths from non-communicable disease and from all causes combined are impacted in the short, medium, and long run. These findings are further corroborated by a between-unit analysis using coarsened exact matching and a simulation-based regression approach to predicting geographically anchored mortality differences.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.