Undoing resilience: immigrant status and poor health following incarceration

In the United States, foreign-born persons often have better health outcomes than their native-born peers, despite exposure to adversity. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether this pattern extends to the consequences of life events, such as incarceration, that separate immigrants from their supportive networks and increase exposure to adversity. Accordingly, using four waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, hierarchical generalized linear models were used to examine within-individual changes in self-rated health following first incarceration (N = 31,202 person-waves).

The results showed that incarceration was associated with modest health declines that were similar in magnitude for immigrant and native-born persons. Supplemental analyses revealed that these effects did not vary by immigrant race or ethnicity, or by age at immigration. The only exception was for immigrants from low- and middle-income countries, who were marginally less likely to experience health declines following incarceration.

In general, incarceration appears to be similarly health damaging for immigrants and non-immigrants. These findings raise important questions about how incarceration is linked to health declines for foreign- and native-born populations and emphasize the importance of access to healthcare for individuals released from correctional facilities. More research is needed, however, to further examine the cumulative impacts of incarceration on immigrants' health across the life course, and to assess a broader spectrum of health outcomes.