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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henrywood, two segments, three interviews today.

We'll hear a first from Wander Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative on the health effects of imprisonment.

And then we'll hear an excerpt from an interview I did with the psychiatrist Terry Cooper's in 2013

on the effects of solitary confinement on prisoners.

And then B.K. White, a worker and union official at the Chevron Refinery Enrichment California,

we'll talk about why they're in the verge of striking.

First, prisoner health. It's dismal. Incarceration makes you sick, physically and mentally,

and medical attention is a poor quality, if it's available at all,

plus a number of states charge prisoners for their care, even though most inmates barely have a dime.

Every year behind bars takes two years off one's life expectancy.

The third more detail is Wander Bertram, a communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative,

a fancy title that embarrasses her some, so she also answers to the title writer Wander Bertram.

So I guess there's no news that people in prison are not the healthiest part of the population,

but the numbers are really dramatic, aren't they?

They really are. Prisons are inherently unhealthy places,

but I think they're even more unhealthy than most people understand.

And it's because of a lot of different things that you can get into,

but the first thing I'd like to point out is that a lot of serious chronic illnesses

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