Drug Policies that lead to mass incarceration have huge implications for health. Not only do they adversely affect the individual who is incarcerated, but they also impact their families. Children who grow up in a single parent household are at increased risk for a host of health outcomes both mental and physical. In addition, the economic hardship that results from a parent being incarcerated results in decreased quality of parental care, stress, and has long term implications for the single parent who is left to care for the family. An evaluation of drug policies will help us understand how it impacts health(mental and physical), income, and educational attainment of children who have at least one parent incarcerated as a result of drug policies. Children who are most likely to be affected tend to be low-income, and in certain areas predominantly African American and Latino.
A multipart intervention that includes vocational training, parental skills building, and drug counseling may be helpful. I would utilize a matched, Pre-Post study design comparing cities that implemented the intervention and matching them to cities that did not. In addition to the expense of rolling out this intervention, a huge challenge may be matching cities. It may be difficult to find cities that are similar enough to compare. Also, individuals involved in the drug trade tend to be concentrated in cities that are low-income, so it may be difficult to attribute health outcomes to the policy. Exposure to environmental pollutants, other stressors, and a poor food environment which all contribute to poor health may be difficult to overcome by just changing drug-related incarceration policies. Finally, health outcomes may not be measurable at the neighborhood-level but looking at individual families and assessing outcomes at the individual-level may give us insights into the impact of the policy.