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Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) are well suited to address healthharming legal needs associated with the collateral consequences of mass incarceration in the United States, such as those that limit access to food, housing, employment, and family reunification postrelease.MLP innovations seek to expand the current model to address patients' criminal, as well as postrelease, civil legal needs by including community health workers and some patients as legal partners and creating coalitions to promote local and state policy change.Overall, this article explains how these MLP innovations can support rights of people returning to communities after incarceration and can be leveraged to mitigate criminal legal system involvement.Early MLPs in Health Care Initiated in 1993, medical-legal partnership (MLP) is an innovation in the delivery of health care that interweaves the skills of health and law professionals to tackle structural barriers to health by addressing legal issues, such as those related to poor housing conditions and immigration, which interfere with health and well-being. 1,2,3In so doing, MLPs aim to create change at the individual, health system, and policy level.Recently, the scope of MLPs has expanded from the civil legal needs of typically minoritized patients to the criminal and civil legal needs of people with histories of incarceration. 4 On any given day in 2021, the criminal legal system in the United States detained almost 1.9 million people; in that year, almost 7 million people were jailed and close to 4 million were on probation or parole. 5,6,7Incarceration has a disproportionate impact on Black and Latinx people, with the imprisonment rate for Black men at the end of 2021 being more than 5 times that for White men. 5 People who are incarcerated also have a high prevalence of many chronic physical and mental health conditions.As of 2016, more than quarter of people in state prisons had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, 8 almost half had a substance use disorder, 9 and almost half reported ever having a chronic health condition. 10The so-called collateral consequences of criminal legal system involvement, which refers to the system of sanctions that people who have a criminal record face-including barriers to food access, housing, and employment-
Puglisi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.