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Mass incarceration and public health: the association between black jail incarceration and adverse birth outcomes among black women in Louisiana

BACKGROUND: A growing body of evidence is beginning to highlight how mass incarceration shapes inequalities in population health. Non-Hispanic blacks are disproportionately affected by incarceration and criminal law enforcement, an enduring legacy of a racially-biased criminal justice system with br...

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Autores principales: Dyer, Lauren, Hardeman, Rachel, Vilda, Dovile, Theall, Katherine, Wallace, Maeve
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6935062/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31881857
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12884-019-2690-z
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author Dyer, Lauren
Hardeman, Rachel
Vilda, Dovile
Theall, Katherine
Wallace, Maeve
author_facet Dyer, Lauren
Hardeman, Rachel
Vilda, Dovile
Theall, Katherine
Wallace, Maeve
author_sort Dyer, Lauren
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: A growing body of evidence is beginning to highlight how mass incarceration shapes inequalities in population health. Non-Hispanic blacks are disproportionately affected by incarceration and criminal law enforcement, an enduring legacy of a racially-biased criminal justice system with broad health implications for black families and communities. Louisiana has consistently maintained one of the highest rates of black incarceration in the nation. Concurrently, large racial disparities in population health persist. METHODS: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of all births among non-Hispanic black women in Louisiana in 2014 to identify associations between parish-level (county equivalent) prevalence of jail incarceration within the black population and adverse birth outcomes (N = 23,954). We fit a log-Poisson model with generalized estimating equations to approximate the relative risk of preterm birth and low birth weight associated with an interquartile range increase in incarceration, controlling for confounders. In sensitivity analyses, we additionally adjusted for the parish-level index crime prevalence and analyzed regression models wherein white incarceration was used to predict the risk of adverse birth outcomes in order to quantify the degree to which mass incarceration may harm health above and beyond living in a high crime area. RESULTS: There was a significant 3% higher risk of preterm birth among black women associated with an interquartile range increase in the parish-level incarceration prevalence of black individuals, independent of other factors. Adjusting for the prevalence of index crimes did not substantively change the results of the models. CONCLUSION: Due to the positive significant associations between the prevalence of black individuals incarcerated in Louisiana jails and estimated risk of preterm birth, mass incarceration may be an underlying cause of the persistent inequities in reproductive health outcomes experienced by black women in Louisiana. Not only are there economic and social impacts stemming from mass incarceration, but there may also be implications for population health and health inequities, including the persistence of racial disparities in preterm birth and low birth weight.
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spelling pubmed-69350622019-12-30 Mass incarceration and public health: the association between black jail incarceration and adverse birth outcomes among black women in Louisiana Dyer, Lauren Hardeman, Rachel Vilda, Dovile Theall, Katherine Wallace, Maeve BMC Pregnancy Childbirth Research Article BACKGROUND: A growing body of evidence is beginning to highlight how mass incarceration shapes inequalities in population health. Non-Hispanic blacks are disproportionately affected by incarceration and criminal law enforcement, an enduring legacy of a racially-biased criminal justice system with broad health implications for black families and communities. Louisiana has consistently maintained one of the highest rates of black incarceration in the nation. Concurrently, large racial disparities in population health persist. METHODS: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of all births among non-Hispanic black women in Louisiana in 2014 to identify associations between parish-level (county equivalent) prevalence of jail incarceration within the black population and adverse birth outcomes (N = 23,954). We fit a log-Poisson model with generalized estimating equations to approximate the relative risk of preterm birth and low birth weight associated with an interquartile range increase in incarceration, controlling for confounders. In sensitivity analyses, we additionally adjusted for the parish-level index crime prevalence and analyzed regression models wherein white incarceration was used to predict the risk of adverse birth outcomes in order to quantify the degree to which mass incarceration may harm health above and beyond living in a high crime area. RESULTS: There was a significant 3% higher risk of preterm birth among black women associated with an interquartile range increase in the parish-level incarceration prevalence of black individuals, independent of other factors. Adjusting for the prevalence of index crimes did not substantively change the results of the models. CONCLUSION: Due to the positive significant associations between the prevalence of black individuals incarcerated in Louisiana jails and estimated risk of preterm birth, mass incarceration may be an underlying cause of the persistent inequities in reproductive health outcomes experienced by black women in Louisiana. Not only are there economic and social impacts stemming from mass incarceration, but there may also be implications for population health and health inequities, including the persistence of racial disparities in preterm birth and low birth weight. BioMed Central 2019-12-27 /pmc/articles/PMC6935062/ /pubmed/31881857 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12884-019-2690-z Text en © The Author(s). 2019 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Dyer, Lauren
Hardeman, Rachel
Vilda, Dovile
Theall, Katherine
Wallace, Maeve
Mass incarceration and public health: the association between black jail incarceration and adverse birth outcomes among black women in Louisiana
title Mass incarceration and public health: the association between black jail incarceration and adverse birth outcomes among black women in Louisiana
title_full Mass incarceration and public health: the association between black jail incarceration and adverse birth outcomes among black women in Louisiana
title_fullStr Mass incarceration and public health: the association between black jail incarceration and adverse birth outcomes among black women in Louisiana
title_full_unstemmed Mass incarceration and public health: the association between black jail incarceration and adverse birth outcomes among black women in Louisiana
title_short Mass incarceration and public health: the association between black jail incarceration and adverse birth outcomes among black women in Louisiana
title_sort mass incarceration and public health: the association between black jail incarceration and adverse birth outcomes among black women in louisiana
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6935062/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31881857
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12884-019-2690-z
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