Beschreibung:
The aim of this paper is to show that at a systemic level, the outsourcing of health care in prisons and jails has or will soon provide such a paucity of health care that the level of care could be considered cruel and unusual punishment and thus be unconstitutional. This result is inevitable considering the race to the bottom that occurs when several for-profit companies compete for a correctional system's health care contract, and considering that the prison population has little or no power as a social or political constituency. Section II will examine the legal standards under which inmates may bring actions alleging paucity of health care. Section III will argue that the practice of outsourcing prison and jail health care inexorably leads to a violation of inmates' Constitutional rights. Section IV will suggest ways to improve correctional institutions' health care systems