How Health Care and Family Support Effect Incarcerated Women

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How Health Care and Family Support Effect Incarcerated Women

Introduction

As the rate of crime is increasing across the globe, the number of imprisoned women is, therefore, increasing in the prisons everywhere too. In the United States alone, the number of incarcerated women is increasing at an alarming rate and there are various underlying issued that lead to the incarceration of women. The biggest problems with incarcerated women are their psychological imbalances which are caused because of the lack of family support and health care problems. In this regard, it is very important to consider the health care imprisoned women and the extension of family support must be provided to them so that they can overcome psychological disorders (Marquart, 1997).

Many studies have shown extensive healthcare and family support provided to incarcerated women can help them overcome their health problems. Things become more complicated when incarcerated women are pregnant or when they have infant children to be raised within the prison setup. In this regards, it becomes immensely important for the concerned authorities to design interventions aimed at the improvement of healthcare facilities provided to incarcerated women, so the children born to them could also be healthy (Mieczkowski, 1994). One more important factor, which profoundly affects the behavior and psychology of incarcerated women, is support from their families. Usually, if their families abandon them and do not contact them because of their imprisonment, they become more psychologically disturbed and stressed because of the social stigma of being incarcerated and their health becomes adversely affected. In this paper, we would be looking at the effects of family support and improved healthcare facilities provided to incarcerated women and how these two factors affect the psychological health of these women (Harlow, 1999).

For many years, health systems and the prison authorities pay little attention to the needs of incarcerated women. This is explained by the fact, which is far too easily accepted, that in prisons around the world, women are a minority. Only recently we observed that this fact does not justify ignoring the rights of women or, for judicial systems, remain insensitive to the differences between men and women. There are, in Europe alone, approximately 100,000 women and girls incarcerated. Although they represent only a small proportion of the prison population - the European average at 4.4%, the number of female prisoners is increasing, often faster than the number of male. Many women serve short sentences for nonviolent offenses, theft or drug trafficking. Women prisoners often come from disadvantaged backgrounds, suffer from problems related to alcoholism or drug addiction and contagious diseases and reproductive health (Krane, 1998).

They also have a history of physical and sexual abuse. It is reported alarming rates of mental health problems such as PTSD, depression, anxiety and tendency to self-harm and suicide. In England and Wales of Wales, it was noted that 90% of incarcerated women had a recognized mental disorder, were drug addicts, or both things at ...