“This report examines Pew’s findings on state prison health care spending and explores the factors driving costs higher. It also illustrates a variety of promising approaches that states are taking to address these challenges … These examples offer important lessons as policymakers seek the best ways to make their correctional health care systems effective and affordable” (p. 4). Sections of this publication include: overview; the challenge for the states—location, staffing, and inmate transportation, a legal standard for care, prevalence of metal illness and disease, and the growth in the number of older inmates and their associated higher costs; sates responses to growing costs—telehealth technologies, advances in outsourcing of care, Medicaid financing, and the paroling of elderly and/or ill inmates.
