The Shifting Correctional Health Care Market

Quantifying spending on the correctional health care market is difficult due to the many disparate systems that provide health care services in correctional facilities. While health care is not the highest cost to correctional budgets (personnel costs outstrip health care), states and the federal government still spend a substantial amount of funding on health care.

Based on the best available data, state prisons spent 11% of their total budgets, or $4.7 billion, on health care in 2015. This is actually an underestimate as it does not include spending on state health care employees (see The Price of Prisons: Examining . . .