Go To Prison and Live Longer

The conventional wisdom is that a stint in prison is, between one thing and another, going to reduce your lifespan.  But scholarly inquiry shows this is not true.  The opposite is true.  See this entry on Sentencing Law and Policy, the body of which I repeat verbatim below.  The research is from Ohio, but I know of no reason to think Ohio is not fairly representative of the nation.

This paper analyzes the effect of incarceration on mortality using administrative data from Ohio between 1992 and 2017. Using event study and difference-in-differences approaches, we compare mortality risk across incarcerated and non-incarcerated individuals before and after pre-scheduled releases from prison. Mortality risk halves during the period of incarceration, with large declines in murders, overdoses, and medical causes of death. However, there is no detectable effect on post-release mortality risk, meaning that incarceration increases overall longevity. We estimate that incarceration averts nearly two thousand deaths annually in the US, comparable to the 2014 Medicaid expansion.

H/t to the estimable Doug Berman.