Reproductive health needs of recently incarcerated youth during community reentry: a systematic review.

BACKGROUND

Youth involved in the juvenile justice system have high reproductive health needs and, on exiting detention, face the challenging transition of reentry. We conducted a systematic literature review to describe what is known about youths' reproductive health needs during community reentry after incarceration.

METHODS

We searched PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar for articles containing key words with the concepts 'child or adolescent', 'incarcerated' and 'reentry'. In the search, we defined the concept of 'reentry' as within 1 month prior to release (to include interventions involving pre-release planning) and up to 18 months after release from incarceration.

RESULTS

Our search yielded 2187 articles. After applying all exclusion criteria, 14 articles on reproductive health remained for extraction. The articles provided data on the following aspects of youths' reproductive health: frequency of condom use (eight articles), sexual risk behaviours other than lack of condom use (seven articles), and prevalence of sexually transmitted infections (three articles).

CONCLUSIONS

The literature on the reproductive health needs of youth undergoing reentry is extremely limited. Current intervention studies yield mixed but promising results and more intervention studies that address both pre-release reentry planning and the post-incarceration period are needed. Given incarcerated youths' well-documented reproductive health disparities compared with non-incarcerated adolescents, the identified gaps represent important opportunities for future research and programmatic emphasis.