The purpose of this research is to examine the current status of health care within the American state and federal correctional systems. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which prison-related health care takes place, and then to discuss the administrative environment in which treatment takes place, the availability of primary, maintenance, and rehabilitative health-care services for the varieties of both major and minor medical problems and where they are provided, the quality of care and how it is monitored, and the economic aspects of health-care services in prisons.

In 1971, describing prisons as factories of crime, Ramsey Clark (1971, pp. 212-13) wrote that ninety-five per cent of all expenditure in the entire corrections effort of the nation is for custody–iron bars, stone walls, guards. Five per cent is for …