Population health and the carceral continuum: A narrative review

Abstract

Introduction Mass incarceration in the US constitutes only one facet of a larger carceral network. Key carceral logics such as punishment, policing, surveillance, pathologization, and confinement have become integral components in immigration and human services provision. Though the criminal legal system's public health impact has been widely studied at the individual level, the body of work concerning the community-level health consequences of this expanded carceral continuum is more nascent. This narrative review aims to synthesize existing quantitative research examining the carceral system's effects on community health, contextualized within theoretical literature stemming from the humanities and social sciences. Methods We searched PubMed, SocINDEX, and Google Scholar, identifying 35 relevant studies. Articles were reviewed by teams of two researchers based on established inclusion criteria. Results At the community level, the PIC is strongly associated with higher risk of infectious and chronic diseases, sexually transmitted infections, mental health outcomes, and increased mortality. Similarly strong evidence demonstrates that carceral practices foundational to anti-immigrant policy, such as indefinite detention, family separation, and ICE surveillance, worsen immigrants' physical and mental health regardless of legal status. While literature on community-level carcerality in the welfare state is scarce, social services' close cooperation with policing institutions and stringent recipient requirements have some negative effects on racialized neighborhoods’ health. Discussion Additional research is needed on the community-level health effects of mass criminalization prior to incarceration, community-level immigrant health outcomes, punitive welfare policies, and surveillance of welfare recipients.