A Discussion with Christine Mitchell, Carlos Martinez, David Fathi, and Shamsher Samra
December 11, 2024
In this final session of the series we seek to envision a transformative future for carceral healthcare systems that breaks away from outdated frameworks to be responsive, inclusive, and centered on the well-being of individuals. Drawing on decades of experience and data, our guests helped us reimagine a blueprint of solutions to systemic issues that have persisted and propose new directions to models that extend beyond traditional carceral systems to address both the immediate and long-term health needs of individuals. We explored how technology could be leveraged for continuity of care, and the role of community-based interventions and policy reforms that prioritize equitable health access. We also questioned how policy changes within and beyond healthcare systems can protect patients from criminal system contact – particularly individuals already living at the margins. Through this discussion we look forward to inspiring a call to action for stakeholders to collaboratively develop and implement visionary strategies to drive meaningful and creative change into a reimagination of the framework of carceral care.
Speakers
Christine Mitchell is the program director of the Health Instead of Punishment program at Human Impact Partners, a national public health nonprofit headquartered in Berkeley, CA. She is an organizer with the Boston-based DeeperThanWater Coalition and a co-author of the American Public Health Association policy statements on law enforcement violence and carceral systems. She has a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School and a Doctor of Science in Social and Behavioral Sciences from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Carlos Martinez is Assistant Professor of Latin American & Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz. He received his PhD from the Joint Program in Medical Anthropology at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. At UCSF he was affiliated with the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences and at UC Berkeley he was affiliated with the Department of Anthropology. He received his Master of Public Health degree from San Francisco State University's Department of Public Health. His teaching emphasizes the political and health inequalities structuring our society and ways that communities enact change. His research lies at the intersection of medical anthropology, public health, and Latinx/Latin American studies. In its various manifestations, his research examines the health consequences and sociocultural implications of migrant policing, deportation, our fractured asylum system, environmental injustice, and the global War on Drugs. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming book, All This Safety Is Killing Us: Health Justice Beyond Prisons, Police, and Borders—Abolitionist Frameworks and Practices from Clinicians, Organizers, and Incarcerated Activists. His current book project, Captive States: Migration and Expulsion on the Carceral Frontier, ethnographically examines how the U.S. deportation regime and asylum deterrence policies have transformed the U.S.-Mexico borderland region into a zone of captivity for asylum seekers and deportees.
David Fathi is Director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, which brings challenges to conditions of confinement in prisons, jails, and other detention facilities, and works to end the policies that have given the United States the highest incarceration rate in the world. He worked as a staff lawyer at the Project for more than ten years before becoming director in 2010, and has special expertise in challenging “supermax” prisons, where prisoners are held for months or years at a time in conditions of near-total isolation. From 2012 to 2015 he represented the ACLU in negotiations leading to adoption of the United Nations Revised Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the “Nelson Mandela Rules.”
Shamsher Samra, MD, MPhil is Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harbor UCLA and co-Chair of the Structural Racism and Health Equity Theme at UCLA School of Medicine. He is a member of Frontline Wellness Network -a grassroots organization of care workers committed to improving health and systems of care through decarceration. He is the former medical director of the Whole Person Care Reentry Program and currently supports Los Angeles County Department of Health Service in implementation of the 1115 Medicaid reentry waiver. He is the co-founder the Safe Harbor Violence Intervention Program and Trauma Recovery Center at Harbor UCLA Medical Center.
Links to resources shared during the event
- ACLU: Federal Judge Issues Sweeping Remedial Order to Arizona Prison Officials
- Does Barbaric Georgia prison cell photo depict an American Abu Ghraib?
- For inmates, little escape from brutal heat in prisons without air conditioning
- Study evaluates impacts of summer heat in U.S. prison environments
- How We Survived Extreme Heat in Prison
- Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie
- Still Life: America’s Increasing Use of Life and Long-Term Sentences
- Living Death: Sentenced to Die Behind Bars for What?
- No End In Sight: America’s Enduring Reliance on Life Sentences
- Deeper Than Water
- Dirty Water: Water at state’s largest prison raises concerns
- Norfolk inmate starts hunger strike over water
- Human Impact Partners: Health Instead of Punishment
- Addressing Law Enforcement Violence as a Public Health Issue
- Advancing Public Health Interventions to Address the Harms of the Carceral System
- Abolition and Disability Justice Collective: Reforms to Avoid
- Pain And Profits: Sheriffs Hand Off Inmate Care To Private Health Companies
- All This Safety Is Killing Us: Health Justice Beyond Prisons, Police, and Borders–Abolitionist frameworks and practices from clinicians, organizers, and incarcerated activists
- Community Over Cages
- Justice LA
- Dismantling Mass Incarceration
- LA Supervisors Vote to Explore Creating Locked, 'Non-Correctional' Mental Health Facilities
- How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against Imprisonment
- Allying Public Health and Abolition: Lessons From the Campaign Against Jail Construction in Los Angeles
- Care Not Cages
- LA County Reaches Settlement with ACLU to Improve Conditions in Jails
- "Even Though the System Had Failed Him His Entire Life, We Were Failing Him Yet Again”: How Clinical, Welfare, and Penal Medicine Interact to Drive Health Inequities and Medical Moral Injury
- Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis
- Stop Cop Cities; Invest in Public Health Solutions
- The police paradox: A qualitative study of post-overdose outreach program implementation through public health-public safety partnerships in Massachusetts
The Diagnosis of Incarceration speaker series is moderated and organized by Kennedy School MPA Candidate Dr. Cara Muñoz Buchanan, in collaboration with Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and Sandra Susan Smith, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice; Faculty Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management; Director, Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy; Professor of Sociology; and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute.