Investigating the reciprocal effect of the carceral experience and individual and community health

To research two causal arrows--from incarceration to health, and from health to incarceration--as distinct phases of a cycle in which punitive criminal justice policy progressively undermines community health, in order to shift policy debates away from solutions that focus solely on the justice system and its actors to solutions that operate at the community level by providing empirical markers for the effects of criminal justice policy on health and for the degree to which the criminal justice system itself has been a public policy response to health problems in poor communities.