The Washington Post highlighted a study by Samantha Boch, PhD, assistant professor in the UC College of Nursing, that attempts to shed light on the ripple effects of mass incarceration.
Her analysis suggests that youth with a family history of incarceration are more likely to be diagnosed with physical and mental health conditions than other youth.
Published in the journal Academic Pediatrics, the study looked at 11 years' worth of electronic health records from Cincinnati Children's, analyzing over 1.74 million unique patients under age 21 years between 2009 and 2020.
Researchers searched the records for keywords such as "incarcerated," "parole" and "jail" for signs of justice system involvement, and then compared the records of patients with a justice keyword in their chart with those of demographically similar patients.
Boch and her team of researchers identified nearly 38,300 patients with justice keywords in their files, 2.2 percent of the total sample.
