NCJ Number
85495
Date Published
1982
Length
13 pages
Annotation
Sex, race, class, legal status, and social role as patient all contribute to the inadequate medical care of female inmates, and those programs that have been most successful in addressing the health needs of female inmates have focused on issues of power and powerlessness.
Abstract
Gender, race, class background, legal status, and social role as patient mitigate against equal and open communication between the patient and the health worker. Sexism produces a prejudiced view of female intelligence and stereotyped notions of appropriate behavior and public roles. Sex stereotypes include fixed concepts about female criminality, sexuality, sex-appropriate diseases, and behavior and role requirements. Only those health workers who are comfortable with assertive, independent women tend to work well with female prisoners. Racism causes the minority inmate to be timid about speaking up, complaining, or discussing health matters with the medical worker or physician, especially when the worker is white. Because of the impoverished background of most female inmates, they have had neither the resources nor the conditioning to seek medical care when it is needed. Because medical personnel, particularly psychiatrists and other mental health workers, have the power to influence the release process, such power has a corrupting influence on the relationship between the inmates and the service providers. Further, the dependency and submission of any medical patient is intensified for the prisoner, because she is incapable of going elsewhere to satisfy her medical needs and because physicians' decisions affect classification, in-prison movement, and release. Some examples of inmate health care programs that have attempted to address these factors that undermine the inmate-health care worker relationship are briefly described, and 27 notes are listed.