The United States correctional system is facing an urgent crisis in how to meet the health care needs of its prisoners. As the number of inmates in correctional facilities increases, prisons struggle to adequately address health care needs in a financially feasible way. Many prisoners enter the system with medical problems that have gone unmet, and the toxic environments inside the prisons further compromise their health, causing serious problems both within the prisons themselves and in society as a whole when the prisoners are released. Health and Health Care in the Nation's Prisons presents a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the health care challenges facing today's prisons along with concrete recommendations for change. In addition to an overview of the most common prison health care problems, this book provides a unique assessment of the needs of largely-overlooked prison populations, including women, people of color, and older adults. Authors Melvin Delgado and Denise Humm-Delgado cover high profile health care needs, such as substance abuse and mental illness, as well as lower profile needs like hepatitis and STDs. They also provide essential background information on the development of today's crisis by tracing the history of the U.S. health care system and how it has changed over time to meet social needs.

The role and importance of assessment in development of health and social services are well accepted in the field, and represent the fundamental building blocks for the creation of any form of social intervention. Need assessments are, without question, the most common form of assessment in these fields. They typically, however, result in a rather narrow view of a community that stresses disease risk profiles and lists of various social problem categories. Nevertheless, unlike needs assessments, asset assessments bring a range of factors and considerations to the creation of an intervention that are guided by participatory democratic principles and processes. Although need assessments can also be guided by participatory principles, they generally are professionally-driven and do not stress capacity enhancement in the process. Asset assessments' emphasis on participatory democracy sufficiently distance themselves from their needs counterpart through the use of values, language used to communicate, and how research methods get conceptualized and carried out. Community asset assessments can be viewed as a goal; a strategy; a set of guiding principles; a method; and a process. These different perspectives make a consensus definition of a capital difficult to arrive at in both scholarly and practice realms. Consequently, it is best to view asset assessments from an evolutionary point of view in order to appreciate the variety of perspectives, tensions, and potential for achieving positive social change. In essence asset assessments are both an instrument of discovery as well as an intervention to achieve community change.