Improving the Oral Health of Prisoners to Improve Overall Health and Well-Being

General health and oral health are linked. The surgeon general’s report on the state of the nation’s oral health indicates that you can’t have one without the other. The same report notes that while the oral health of the nation improved significantly over the 20th century, there are major disparities in oral health among subpopulations.1 The formal call for papers for this issue of the Journal yielded no papers on oral health in the prison system. A review of the literature in PubMed turned up very few published articles on the oral health of prisoners or systems to provide prisoners with oral health care; of the 12 peer-reviewed articles found, 5 were published outside the United States, 4 were published in 1977 or earlier, and only 1 discussed juvenile offenders in detention. To better understand the status of oral health in our nation’s prisons, we read what literature we could find and spoke to several dentists who work in the prison system.