Posted Date: June 11, 2008

Healthcare & Prison Crises Are Top Community Issues

By Dr. Henrie M. Treadwell
BlackNews.com

Atlanta, GA—Legal scholars, health-care advocates and public officials participating in a recent Freedom's Voice Conference here depicted a health and prison crisis that is limiting opportunities for people of color and devastating our communities.
   The three-day conference, which was sponsored in April by the Morehouse School of Medicine's Community Voices program, offered recommendations on how to address many of the problems. But the esteemed panelists also sent a clear message that there must be decisive action to reverse public policies sending record numbers of people to prison, leaving those outside prison walls without access to health care and restricting people of color to segregated communities.
   The conference cited policies that should be expanded because they are helping communities, while criticizing policies negatively impacting communities of color.
   For instance, Nkechi Taifa, a senior policy analyst at the Open Society Policy Center, praised enactment of the Second Chance Act, which authorizes that strategic plans be developed for assisting juvenile and adult inmates to successfully reenter their communities and help them find jobs. Data shows that 700,000 inmates are released from prison each year, but about two-thirds return to prison within three years.
Ms. Taifa said the measure will provide former convicts with better access to family unification, job training, education, housing, substance abuse and mental health services.
   But she also warned that only authorizing legislation was signed into law, and that supporters must fight for full funding of the program.
   Judge Greg Mathis of Michigan noted that African-American men represent nearly 60 percent of the nation's prison population, but are only six percent of our society.
  "What is the effect of that?" Judge Mathis asked. "Well, the effect, as it relates to health is: One, we have poverty, disproportionate poverty, single-family homes. And then, of course, and this might be somewhat controversial, but it's true, we have a higher rate of HIV and AIDS because in the prisons men engage—many of them, very many of them, in homosexual activity."

(Dr. Henrie M. Treadwell is director of Community Voices: Healthcare for the Underserved of Morehouse School of Medicine.)

 

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