Assessing Smoking and Tobacco in Ohio Prisons

Ohio State University, Columbus OH

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Abstract

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, and exposure to passive smoke is responsible for disease and death in non-smokers (USDHHS, 2004; USDHHS, 2006). Reducing the disability, illness, and death caused by tobacco use is a key Healthy People 2010 goal (USDHHS, 2000). Prisoners are disproportionately affected by tobacco use. Estimates of the smoking prevalence among prisoners range from 60-80%, compared to only 21% in the non-institutionalized population (Vaughn and del Carmen, 1993; CDC, 2006). Though often invisible to the larger society, prisoners represent a large and growing segment of the U.S. population, where incarceration rates are now the highest in the world (Travis, 2005). At any given time more than 2.1 million people are being held in American jails and prisons, and nearly 8 million individuals exit jail and prison each year and return to their home communities (Harrison and Beck, 2006; Hammett, 2002). As centers for the amplification and spread of disease, poorly managed prisons have the potential to act as epidemiological pumps, undermining the public health, yet prisons also offer unique public health opportunities (Jacobi, 2005). Interventions that improve the health of prisoners have the potential to reduce health disparities that have long been resistant to change. Given the well-documented health effects of tobacco smoke exposure and high rates of prisoner smoking noted above, tobacco control efforts are an ideal first step in improving prisoner health; however a paucity of research examining smoking in prisons has left prison administrators ill-equipped to develop sound tobacco control policies for correctional institutions. Social, economic, and legal factors have led many prisons to adopt total or partial tobacco bans (Vaughn and del Carmen, 1993; Linhorst et al., 2001), however the efficacy of these policies remains unclear. We seek to study tobacco use in two Ohio prisons with indoor tobacco bans using complimentary quantitative and qualitative research methods. One objective of this proposal is to examine the influence of an indoor tobacco ban on smoking behaviors among low-security prisoners. While prior work has examined the prevalence of smoking in facilities with limited or no smoking restrictions and, to a lesser extent, those with complete tobacco bans there has not been an examination of the influence of an indoor smoking ban, like that in Ohio prisons, on prisoner smoking behaviors (Cropsey et al., 2004; Vaughn and del Carmen, 1993; Cropsey and Kristeller, 2005; Lankenau, 2001). A second objective is to provide prison administrators with the information needed to develop successful policies by gathering information on prisoner attitudes toward tobacco control policies and cessation programs in correctional settings. The study is also intended to lay the groundwork for future studies of tobacco use in prison facilities. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]