Incarceration & Mortality: New Data and Developments

• In Event: Lightning Talk: New Directions in Health Criminology

Abstract

A key struggle faced by criminologists who seek to study the health outcomes of individuals and family members during and after incarceration is linking health and criminal legal system records due to the necessary privacy concerns regarding each. As a result, much of what is known about the incarceration–health relationship comes from a few longitudinal datasets that lack critical information surrounding the incarceration event(s). With the assistance and support of the Utah Department of Corrections and the Utah Population Database teams, I created a novel dataset with more than 200,000 records linking vital statistics to incarceration records for individuals, their known spouses and children, and matched controls. This novel dataset includes detailed information about the imprisonment and offending for two cohorts of formerly incarcerated people, from 1984-1989 and 2010-2024, to allow for the analysis of both short and long-term effects of incarceration on mortality and birth outcomes. This presentation will discuss the challenges, process, and preliminary data analysis of this new dataset. This is the first step in a larger project where, with funding, incarceration and family records can be linked to a diverse and unique set of health records.

Author

• Katherine A. Durante, University of Utah