BACKGROUND In December 2014, China announced that only voluntarily donated organs from citizens would be used for transplantation after January 1, 2015. Many medical professionals worldwide believe that China has stopped using organs from death-row prisoners. DISCUSSION In the present article, we briefly review the historical development of organ procurement from death-row prisoners in China ...

A number of claims have been made regarding the importance of prisoners staying in touch with their family through prison visits. Firstly from a humanitarian perspective of enabling family members to see each other, but also regarding the impact of maintaining family ties for successful rehabilitation, reintegration into society and reduced re-offending. This growing evidence base has resulted ...

Prisoners are at increased risk of suicide. Investigation of both individual and environmental risk factors may assist in developing suicide prevention policies for prisoners and other high-risk populations. We conducted a matched case-control interview study with 60 male prisoners who had made near-lethal suicide attempts in prison (cases) and 60 male prisoners who had not (controls). We compa...

People with intellectual disability are over-represented in prisons internationally (Fazel et al. 2008); in Australia, approximately nine to 10 percent of soon-to-be-released prisoners have an intellectual disability (Dias et al. 2013). Prisoners with intellectual disability often experience complex comorbid chronic physical conditions and mental health disorders (Männynsalo et al. 2009; Dias e...

BACKGROUND Prisoners have extremely high rates of smoking with rates 3-4 times higher than the general community. Many prisoners have used heroin. The aims of this study were to investigate the impact of heroin use on smoking cessation and the social determinants of health among prisoners. METHODS Secondary analysis of data from a randomised controlled trial of a multi-component smoking cessa...

Key points • Prisoners are often considered geriatric at the age of 50 or 55 years. • Plans should be made for the increasing use of health care services and medical care costs in the light of the growing number of older prisoners. • Consideration should be given to developing a geriatric, team-based model of care for older prisoners, particularly those with multimorbidity. • The medication lis...

Released prisoners diagnosed with psychotic disorders have elevated rates of violent reoffending risk and their exposure to adverse neighborhood environments may contribute to this risk. We identified all released sentenced prisoners in Sweden between 2003 and 2013 (n = 47226) and followed them up for a median period of 4.4 years. We identified prisoners who had ever been diagnosed with a psych...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the association between drug (DAD) and alcohol (AAD) abuse and dependency and criminal and clinical background by gender of prisoners in São Paulo, Brazil. METHOD Cross-sectional study, random sample stratified by administrative district, from which prisons and prisoners were selected via random, multistage sampling. Psychiatric diagnoses were made with the CIDI 2.1. Life...

BACKGROUND The population of ex-prisoners returning to their communities is large. Morbidity and mortality is increased during the period following release. Understanding utilization of emergency services by this population may inform interventions to reduce adverse outcomes. We examined Emergency Department utilization among a cohort of recently released prisoners. METHODS We linked Rhode Is...