Care and Punishment: The Dilemmas of Prison Medicine

Prout, a physician and assistant dean of students at Harvard Medical School, and Ross, a medical writer, have penned a quietly impassioned, incisive analysis of health care in America's correctional facilities. Neither an indictment nor an idealistic wish list, the book calls for change in a voice grounded in experience. In the 1970s Prout directed the Massachusetts Prison Health Project, and chapters are devoted to that experiment in reform and others, such as today's contracting of prison operations to the private sector. In sections on medical procedure in prisonsincluding facilities, technologies and such practices as surgery and pharmaceuticals dispensationand on specific health problems, such as the threat of AIDS to inmates, the authors balance descriptions of current conditions with prescriptions for their improvement. They plead for a recognition of the ``conflicting goals of care and punishment'' in developing a practical prison health-care plan. Their impressive book should be a step toward that goal. (Jan.)