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Abstract: 

Correctional facilities create a potentially difficult environment for sleeping. Daily routines are filled with monotony, boredom, and napping. Inmates have little immediate control over their cellmates, their correctional institutions’ staffing choices, and light or noise levels. Their stressors include their arrest and resulting loss of liberty, loss of community standing, pending legal proceedings or appeals, decreased family and social contact, and forced housing with gangs of hardened criminals. Under these circumstances most people would have difficulty sleeping.

Keywords: Antipsychotics; tricyclic antidepressants; benzodiazepines; sleep disorders; insomnia; sleep apnea; polysomnographic sleep study; environmental interventions; behavioral treatment

Affiliations:  1: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation; 2: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.