Recent scholarship has affirmed the importance of overall health and wellbeing for people exposed to incarceration. Specifically, researchers have begun to ascertain how physical and mental health are integral to a returning citizen's wellbeing and future interactions with the criminal justice system. However, this conceptualization of health is limited in scope. We expand this body of research by proposing an eight-domain holistic model of health which includes physical, mental/emotional, social, spiritual, occupational, financial, intellectual, and environmental health. We use data from the LoneStar Project—a representative, multi-wave study of reentering men in Texas.
Respondents were first interviewed in prison prior to release and reinterviewed twice in the community post-release. Using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, we run regressions for each health domain then include all significant correlates from that step into an additional model to predict recidivism until approximately three years postrelease.
Study findings suggest that a more inclusive model of reentry health and wellness is essential to support reentering people as different health domains matter within diverse contexts. Emphasizing a more streamlined approach to encompass all domains of health may be crucial in an effort to adequately prepare recently incarcerated people for a successful reentry process upon prison release.
(Publisher abstract provided.)