Prison Healthcare

I found Massoglia and Schnittker's article on prison healthcare to be a great supplement to some of the issues brought forth by the film we viewed in class.  One of the arguments of the film was that the reintegration of inmates into society is not successful and perpetuates imprisonment and the other social problems that come from a family member being incarcerated.  This article does a good job of bringing forth the psychological effects of imprisonment and also the stress, depression, and anxiety that reintegration into society causes.  These psychological effects on released inmates are a direct result of federal laws that require the past to follow and continually haunt people who have been imprisoned.   The article points to more money being used toward successfully reintegrating ex inmates into society.  The problem does not lie with poor funds for reintegration.  It lies more with a systematic desire to keep the poor  (who are the overwhelming majority of inmates) in jails.  This desire became all too clear in the film when the film makers went so far as to compare the war on drugs, whose prisoners constitute again an overwhelming majority of inmates in America, to any other mass genocide.  The government has turned their backs on support programs for addicts, have given incentives to cops to make as many drug related arrests as possible, and has allowed privatization of prisons that provides the tradeoffs of middle class jobs (always seen as good) in return for keeping prisons full.  It was interesting to me that Massoglia and Shnittker cite that in some instances prisons provide better healthcare than some prisoners could ever receive on the outside.  To me it is clear that providing decent healthcare in prison means nothing if inmates are trapped in the cycle of always going back to prison, because what really does a good quality of life mean when you have no rights?