This study aimed to examine health disparities between prisoners and the general population in South Korea. We sought to estimate the prevalence of 17 physical and mental diseases using the nationwide medication prescription dataset among the total population of prisoners (N = 57,541) in South Korea. The age- and sex- standardized prevalence ratio (SPR) were estimated to compare the disease prevalence between the prisoners and the general population. The disease prevalence for the general

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... tion were calculated from the prescription dataset for a representative of the Korean population (N = 926,246) from 2013 Korean National Health Insurance Service-National Sample Cohort. Further, the disease prevalence of prisoners was compared to that of the low-income general population (N = 159,781). Compared to the general population, prisoners had higher prevalence of almost all physical and mental diseases, including hyperlipidemia (SPR=20.18, 95% CI 19.43-20.94), pulmonary tuberculosis (SPR=9.58, 95% CI 7.91-11.50), diabetes (SPR= 6.13, 95% CI 5.96-6.31), cancer (SPR=2.36, 95% CI 2.07-2.68), and depression (SPR=46.73, 95% CI 44.14-49.43). When additionally compared with a low-income population segment, the disease prevalence among prisoners were still higher for most diseases including pulmonary tuberculosis (SPR=6.39, 95% CI 5.27-7.67) and depression (SPR=34.71, 95%CI 32.79-36.72). We found that prisoners were more likely to be unhealthy than the general population, even in comparison with a low-income segment of the general population.