The Carceral Health Care Panel will bring together organizers, academics, and legal practitioners working at the intersection of health and incarceration. The panel will include discussion of how the inherent violence of the carceral state impacts the health of incarcerated people with a particular emphasis on interactions with disability, madness, and race. We will discuss abolition as both a historical practice and a future imperative for the health of all people, while asking what actions we can take to strengthen the abolition movement and provide immediate assistance to individuals facing health harms while incarcerated. At the request of a panelist, we ask that all attendees wear a face mask during this panel. Masks will be provided.
Speakers:
Liat Ben-Moshe
Liat Ben-Moshe (she/her) is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist working at the intersection of disability/madness, incarceration/decarceration and abolition. She is the author of Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020) and co-editor (with Allison Carey and Chris Chapman) of Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (2014). Dr. Ben-Moshe is an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Jose Saldana
Jose Hamza Saldana (he/him) is the Executive Director of Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), a grassroots community organizing and advocacy organization that seeks to end mass incarceration through the release of aging people in prison and promote racial justice as a means of dismantling the racist criminal legal system, and addressing the crisis of incarcerated people in NYS dying at an average age of 58-years old. He was released from prison in 2018 after 38 years of incarceration. During the decades of his incarceration, he obtained a college degree. He also co-founded several therapeutic programs, including “A Challenge to Change (C2C): A Comprehensive Approach to Addressing Criminal Thinking, Behavior, and Attitudes,” that helped him, and many others learn how to take full responsibility for the harm inflicted on human beings and to develop insight into the lasting impact of this harm on families and communities. In search of a humane and effective way to address interpersonal harm that does not include carceral punishment, he also co-founded “The Restorative Community Project: A Therapeutic Alternative to Incarceration.”
Stefen Short
Stefen R. Short (he/him) is Special Counsel for Disability Justice Projects at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice. He was previously Chief Counsel at Worth Rises, Supervising Attorney and Acting Deputy Director of the Prisoners’ Rights Project of The Legal Aid Society, and a Staff Attorney with Disability Rights New York. Stefen has litigated and advocated for incarcerated people on matters including access to medical and mental health care, access to education, diversion from solitary confinement, free exercise and expression, and protection from harm. He is an adjunct professor of law at Pace Law School.
Johanna Elumn
Johanna Elumn, MSW, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Medicine in General Internal Medicine, Director of the NYKS Justice lab, core faculty of the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice, and the evaluation lead of the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Internal Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. She is a social worker and researcher who brings her personal, clinical, and research experience to studying the intersection of incarceration, sleep, and health disparities using community-engaged research (CEnR) approaches and mixed methods. Her current projects focus on the sleep health of people impacted by incarceration and related health outcomes. In addition, she has expertise in leading interdisciplinary teams and training community members and people with a history of incarceration to work as part of research teams. Prior to transitioning to research, she spent ten years leading the social work unit and community outreach efforts at a community-based public defender office. Her work there focused on designing, implementing, and evaluating services for those involved in the criminal legal system at all stages of their contact, from pre-arrest to reentry.