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QUESTION: Prison Population statistics and health care costs

Submitted by Anonymooose on Tue, 04/01/2008 - 9:12am
question / pregunta: 

I'm doing a research project in which I try to estimate the cost of health care for prisoners as a function of age. The best way (that I can think of) to do this is to find the prison health care spending of each state, and also the prison population characteristics.
The question is, does anyone know where I can find prison population statistics that include age? I need this for each state, and/or the federal prison system. If someone knows how to use census data files, that might help - their summary statistics don't have enough information to be useful.
Thanks for your time.

Answers

Answer posted by: MRM

To get you started, here's a response from a colleague:

There doesn't seem to be any one source for this info. The Census/Stat Abstract has some info in some form, but not at the level the questioner needs. Each state should have something like the NYS webpage, but I'm not sure if that would include Federal inmates housed within a particular state or just state inmates. Tricky question!

Here are the sites I found:

Not broken down by state:
http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/phc-t26.html
http://.../correctional_facilities_prisoners.html
(table #337 by state, not age)

Several different reports, year by year. Seems to be by state:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm

New York State Dep. of Corrections stats (every state is likely to have a similar web page on their site):
http://www.docs.state.ny.us/Research/annotate.html

Answer posted by: jim miller

Also, double check this Radical Reference site itself - we have had many questions on prison statistics - though I don't recall finding sources that would answer this specific question, for those that I helped answer. In our search box at upper right, try: prisons and statistics (6 hits); prisoners and statistics gets 11 hits besides the first answer to this question.

Pubmed.gov gets 278 hits for the search: prison inmates and health and age; 47 hits even if you click on the "Limits" tab just to lower left of the search box, and click on "Links to free full text". I get 2 full text ones for: prison and health care and costs and age (out of 6 total); the same 2 full text (out of 8) for: prison and health care and cost and age; 20 free fulltext (of 89) for prison and cost and age groups; and 14 (58) for: prison and costs and age groups. As you probably have guessed by these examples, Pubmed does not allow truncation; and I might add that Google gets inconsistent results using the asterisk to truncate words.

Jim Miller
jmiller2@umd.edu