An Alarming Connection Between Justice System Involvement and Child Health

Research over the last decade has shown that young people who have been incarcerated can have poorer physical and mental health outcomes than persons who have not been incarcerated, and that youth who have experienced a family member’s incarceration also may experience negative effects.

But a first-of-its kind study conducted at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital used electronic medical records to link children’s personal or family involvement in the correctional system to diagnoses — and the authors say the findings are so alarming they should be a call to action for pediatric providers.

Just 2% of patients had a correctional “keyword” in their record indicating probable personal or parental involvement in the correctional system as recorded by a health professional, but that 2% accounted for 66% of all patients with a cannabis-related diagnosis, 51.8% of all patients with trauma-related disorders and a high proportion of other troubling diagnoses.

“We performed this research at our own institution, and our findings need to be confirmed by other researchers and institutions looking at their own patient populations,” says Deena Chisolm, PhD, director of Center for Child Health Equity and Outcomes Research at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s and an author of the study. “What our study shows, though, is that it’s urgent that the pediatric health care system try to identify children who have justice system involvement, and that we proactively pursue interventions to help them.”