William Rhodes

The Burden of Infectious Disease Among Inmates of and Releasees From US Correctional Facilities, 1997

OBJECTIVES This study developed national estimates of the burden of selected infectious diseases among correctional inmates and releases during 1997. METHODS Data from surveys, surveillance, and other reports were synthesized to develop these estimates. RESULTS During 1997, 20% to 26% of all people living with HIV in the United States, 29% to 43% of all those infected with the hepatitis C virus, and 40% of all those who had tuberculosis disease in that year passed through a correctional facility. CONCLUSIONS Correctional facilities are critical settings for the efficient delivery of prevention and treatment interventions for infectious diseases. Such interventions stand to benefit not only inmates, their families, and partners, but also the public health of the communities to which inmates return.

UNCOPE: A Brief Substance Dependence Screen for Use with Arrestees

A national multi-site monitoring system for determining prevalence of alcohol and drug involvement in arrestees sought to refine the screening for substance dependence among persons arrested and incarcerated in local jails. Fifteen items were selected from the content of existing alcohol and drug abuse screens. These items were evaluated against a detailed diagnostic interview covering criteria of the DSM-IV. A total of 310 prisoners incarcerated within the previous 48 hours were recruited as subjects. Almost 65% of the subjects had a positive diagnosis of dependence for one or more substances. A six-item screen identified by the acronym UNCOPE emerged as the best set of screening items for identifying dependence on alcohol and/or drugs. The UNCOPE had sensitivity of 88% and specificity of 83% for the sample as a whole. It performed similarly irrespective of gender or ethnicity and appears to have potential utility in a wide range of populations.

Stemming the Spread of HIV among IV Drug Users, their Sexual Partners, and Children: Issues and Opportunities for Criminal Justice Agencies

In some urban areas, over 50% of all IV drug users test positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. These infected IV drug users put at risk uninfected drug users with whom they share injection equipment, sexual partners through unprotected sexual intercourse, and children through perinatal transmission. Many—sometimes a majority—of these IV drug users come into contact with the criminal justice system (CJS) and thus become potential targets for programs aimed at educating high-risk individuals about the risk of AIDS and teaching steps that can be taken to reduce those risks. These programs present an opportunity and a burden for the CJS at all stages: pretrial, incarceration, and community supervision.

Following Incarceration, Most Released Offenders Never Return to Prison

Recent studies suggest that 50% of offenders released from state prisons return to prison within 3 to 5 years. In contrast, this article shows that roughly two of every three offenders who enter and exit prison will never return to prison. Using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ newly revised National Corrections Reporting Program, we examine prison admissions and releases over a 13-year period in 17 states and over shorter periods in other states to determine the rate at which individual offenders return to prison. We distinguish between the traditional event-based sampling methods for studying recidivism and our alternative offender-based method, explaining how each is useful but how the two approaches answer different policy questions.

Telling the Truth About Drug Use How Much Does It Matter

The gap between what people admit about their behavior and what is actually true has plagued social scientists and survey methodologists for decades. This gap would not matter if it did not play an important role in estimation of the extent of the consumption of illegal drugs and/or changing trends in illegal use, both data critical for developing public policy and determining the effects of intervention programming and policy changes. The Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) survey matches anonymous self-reported interview information to a urine test for nine drugs in a probability-based sample of adult male arrestees conducted within 48 hr of their arrest. Using data from 2000-2003 and 2007-2011 collected in 10 U.S. counties, this article looks at how the gap between the truth and reality in self-report varies by the drug reported, by the region of the country, over time, and by characteristics of the user, and discusses the relevance of these findings to policy.

Incidence and Cumulative Incidence as Supplemental Measures of the Scale of Imprisonment

Prison growth has primarily been measured as a prevalence over time. We propose cohort-specific supplemental measures: incidence based on the age of first adult admission into prison, and cumulative incidence, based on the proportion of people who will be imprisoned during their lifetime. We present a new estimation method using administrative data. Prior research derived estimates from inmate surveys. The main advantages of this new method are that estimates can be updated every year with little cost and minimal imputation. We present results showing that we have likely reached an inflection point in the growth of cumulative incidence, and the ratio between Blacks and Whites is declining although the disparity is still large—roughly 4.5 to 1.