Structural racism and health: Assessing the mediating role of community mental distress and health care access in the association between mass incarceration and adverse birth outcomes

Research has linked spatial concentrations of incarceration with racial disparities in adverse birth outcomes. However, little is known about the specific mechanisms of this association. This represents an important knowledge gap in terms of intervention. We theorize two pathways that may account for the association between county-level prison rates and adverse birth outcomes: (1) community-level mental distress and (2) reduced health care access. Examining these mechanisms, we conducted a cross-sectional study of county-level prison rates, community-level mental distress, health insurance, availability of primary care physicians (PCP) and mental health providers (MHP), and adverse birth outcomes (preterm birth, low birth weight, infant mortality). Our data set included 475 counties and represented 2,677,840 live U.S. births in 2016. Main analyses involved between 170 and 326 counties. All data came from publicly available sources, including the U.S. Census and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Descriptive and regression results confirmed the link between prison rates and adverse birth outcomes and highlighted Black-White inequities in this association. Further, bootstrap mediation analyses indicated that the impact of spatially concentrated prison rates on preterm birth was mediated by PCP, MHP, community-level mental distress, and health insurance in both crude and adjusted models. Community-level mental distress and health insurance (but not PCP or MHP) similarly mediated low birthweight in both models. Mediators were less stable in the effect on infant mortality with only MHP mediating consistently across models. We conclude that mass incarceration, health care access, and community mental distress represent actionable and urgent targets for structural-, community-, and individual-level interventions targeting population inequities in birth outcomes. •Racialized mass incarceration contributes to racial inequities in adverse birth outcomes.•The mechanisms of this association have never been empirically assessed.•We find that the association is mediated by community-level mental stress and health care access.•This has policy implications in terms of uprooting structural racism and achieving health equity.