Years of Life Lost to Prison: Racial and Gender Gradients in the United States of America

Background: The United States has the highest rate of imprisonment of any country in the world. African Americans and Hispanics comprise a disproportionately large share of the prisonpopulation. We applied a "prison life expectancy" to specify differences in exposure toimprisonment by gender and race at the population level.Methods: The impact of imprisonment on life expectancy in the United States was measured foreach year from 2000 to 2004, and then averaged. Using the Sullivan method, prison and prison-freelife expectancies were estimated by dividing the years lived in each age range of the life table intothese two states using prevalence of imprisonment by gender and race.Results: African American males can expect to spend on average 3.09 years in prison or jail overtheir lifetime and Hispanic and Caucasian males can spend on average 1.06 and 0.50 years,respectively. African American females, on the other hand, can expect to spend on average 0.23years in these institutions and Hispanic and Caucasian females can expect to spend on average 0.09and 0.05 years, respectively. Overall, African American males, the highest risk group, can expect tospend on average 61.80 times longer in prison or jail as compared to Caucasian women, the lowestrisk group.Conclusion: There are clear gender and racial gradients in life expectancy spent in prison in theUnited States. Future research needs to examine how current imprisonment practice in the UnitedStates may influence population health and health disparities.