IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jscscx/v15y2025i1p13-d1827495.html

Court-Managed Policy Change: A Content Analysis of Prison Healthcare Consent Decrees and Settlement Agreements

Author

Listed:
  • Bryant J. Jackson-Green

    (Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL 60660, USA)

  • Jihoon Yuhm

    (Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA)

  • Johnny Vu

    (Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA)

Abstract

While most prison healthcare litigation seeks individual relief, some cases lead to broader structural reform via consent decrees—court-approved “legally binding performance improvement plans” designed to improve conditions. This study systematically analyzes 121 such settlements from 1970 to 2022 to assess their policy goals and implementation strategies. We identify the substantive areas targeted—general medical care, mental health, dental services, and treatment for specialized conditions like HIV, Hepatitis C, and COVID-19—and trace trends across time and geography. These agreements span 39 states and the federal system, with most states subject to multiple cases. They frequently mandate changes to budgets, staffing, facility infrastructure, training, and patient rights, alongside monitoring for quality improvement. Our findings suggest that consent decrees function not only as judicial remedies but as tools of policy development and institutional reform, shedding light on the role of courts in shaping correctional healthcare delivery. These findings also show how institutional responses to healthcare failures in prisons shape the conditions under which serious harm—and in some cases, preventable death—occur behind bars.

Suggested Citation

  • Bryant J. Jackson-Green & Jihoon Yuhm & Johnny Vu, 2025. "Court-Managed Policy Change: A Content Analysis of Prison Healthcare Consent Decrees and Settlement Agreements," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 15(1), pages 1-21, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:15:y:2025:i:1:p:13-:d:1827495
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/15/1/13/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/15/1/13/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:15:y:2025:i:1:p:13-:d:1827495. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask MDPI Indexing Manager to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.