On this month’s episode of the Health Intersections Podcast, Samy Anand from the Medical Care Section recaps last month’s blog posts and previews September’s issue of the Medical Care journal. Check out these great reads. 
Next, Jess Williams, co-editor of the blog and podcast, interviews Dr. Cheryl Conner who is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a dedicated member of the American Public Health Association. The interview delves into a recently published commentary in Medical Care, “Advancing Public Health Interventions to Address the Harms of the Carceral System.”
Listen here or via your favorite podcast streamer – we are on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.
Interested in learning more?
Check out these resources provided by Dr. Conner:
Advancing Public Health Interventions to Address the Harms of the Carceral System (apha.org)
Crime Survivors Speak – Alliance for Safety and Justice
#endpoliceviolence (endingpoliceviolence.com)
Interview Transcript (lightly edited)
Jess Williams 0:01
This month we are going to hear from Cheryl Connor, who is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a dedicated member of the American Public Health Association. Welcome to Healthy Intersections Cheryl.
Cheryl Conner 0:13
Thanks for having me.
Jess Williams 0:15
This month you are the lead author on a commentary and medical care on behalf of the End Police Violence Collective. Can you tell me a little bit about the Collective and what it hopes to accomplish?
Cheryl Conner 0:25
Yes, so the End Police Violence Collective is a group of public health researchers, teachers, graduate students, nonprofit leaders, community organizers, clinicians like myself, who want the field of public health to recognize and mobilize around the abolition of policing and incarceration. We’ve formed through working on the APHA policy statement, addressing law enforcement violence as a public health issue. And then we’ve continued on doing more advocacy and policy work.
Jess Williams 0:59
That’s great. Thank you. And so I saw that your commentary was based on a new APHA policy about the health harms of carceral systems. Can you explain a little bit about what the main goals of that policy is for our listeners?
Cheryl Conner 1:12
So the main goals of the policy statement were to point out that incarceration in all of its various forms, is antithetical to health, and to offer concrete steps to move towards abolition of incarceration. And so we provide a lot of evidence for the health harms, which are both individual to families and to communities, in the commentary and in the policy statement. And then we really try to give these concrete steps, which kind of sort of boil down to decarceration, which is, you know, getting people out of jails and prisons and detention centers. And then we also think it’s really important for public safety and to make these decarceration efforts successful, to divest money and resources, from policing and jails and prisons and into the social determinants of health such as housing, employment and education. And then we will have to build together non-carceral measures such as restorative justice practices to make sure that we have accountability, safety and wellbeing for those that are harmed by interpersonal violence, for example.
Jess Williams 2:28
That’s really helpful. Thank you. I did like seeing in your commentary, how you looked at the health effects for families and communities, as well as individuals, from the carceral system. I thought that was a really nice touch with a commentary and a little bit unique. So one question I had was have the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic changed anything about your work on carceral systems?
Cheryl Conner 2:51
Yes, actually, it’s funny, we had started writing a policy statement on the harms of incarceration and how to approach it with evidence-based lens. And then you know what we did the deadline for APHA policy statements is very early. So we kind of been like, yeah, you know what, let’s like perfect this and submit next year, and then the COVID pandemic hit. And we saw the extraordinarily devastating effects of COVID, in jails and prisons, were incarcerated people were twice as likely to die from COVID as non-incarcerated people. And also, it’s just like the perfect communal setting for rapid spread of infectious disease. And so then we that really spurred us to submit it as a late breaker and the summer of 2020. So we kind of resurrected the statement we’ve been working on and then added a lot more about COVID to it. And so the COVID pandemic made a huge difference. I think the COVID pandemic also showed us that in many places, there was rapid decarceration of people, you know, in different places around the US and also internationally, tried hard to empty their jails and prisons, and we did not see an attendant rise in crime. And so you kind of had like a little bit of proof from the COVID pandemic, that this strategy was also not going to harm public safety.
Jess Williams 4:13
And have you seen any of that decarceration sort of continue or get sort of taken back or sort of stop happening, or is it still ongoing?
Cheryl Conner 4:22
No, it was pretty quickly reversed. Yeah. And actually, by the time we were revising this for, you know, final adoption in the winter of, you know, in spring of 2021, we had seen jails and prisons back up to their pre-pandemic levels. So, yeah, so it really was reversed pretty quickly.
Jess Williams 4:44
Okay. And another thing you mentioned, I sort of wanted to talk a little bit about was we’ve had a ton of episodes about social determinants of health here at Healthy Intersections. And you mentioned a couple of things that you think that the sort of the end police Violence collective and others have sort of suggested as types of sort of social investments that could be beneficial in terms of reducing the impact of the carceral systems on people’s lives and things like that. But I was wondering, do you have any idea of how this investment might be directed? Or what types of processes could be used to figure out basically where to put the money?
Cheryl Conner 5:21
Wow, that’s a really good question. And a very broad question. And I think that when we think about this, you’ll if you read, you know, anyone in abolition space, like Maryam Kaaba, or Andrea Ricci, like, they will talk about how what really ensures public safety as well resourced communities, we know what like safe communities look like. And it looks like well, off suburban, often communities here in Chicago, it looks like the north side of the city. And so we would recommend trying to put resources into under resourced communities, and then make to make those communities as safe as these other ones that already exist. And so some of the things that I think are really crucial to that are housing and employment, as well as really robust public education. And I think there’s a lot of ways for communities to envision, and act out job creation, for the public good. So for example, I was thinking about this. And, and in our city of Chicago, if we invested more of our resources away from the Chicago Police Department away from the Cook County Jail, and instead into the Chicago Parks Department, the Chicago Public Schools, and the Chicago Transportation Authority, then we would have, you know, we would create a lot of jobs right to, to do upkeep to do programming to have, you know, to drive the buses and the trains, to repair them, you know, we could create a lot of jobs by investing in those programs. And then those programs would also like to make our communities better, safer, and healthier. So that’s sort of you know, how I would picture it, like in my local area, doing this
Jess Williams 7:04
Great example. And I liked the way you sort of brought in, you know, that communities might have an impact on that as well, rather than it sort of being a top down approach.
Cheryl Conner 7:14
Oh, definitely. Right. Yeah, we should always be involving the like the local stakeholders who know, you know, what they need in their own community. And I felt like the summer with the lifeguard shortage, it just felt like if we offered higher pay for those positions, we would fill those positions, and then the pools could have been open. And instead, a lot of them weren’t. And that was really, I’m sure awful for a lot of neighborhoods.
Jess Williams 7:38
I mean, especially with all the heat waves and heat everyone experienced this summer. So another thing I kind of wanted to touch on just briefly, you did mention sort of the principles of restorative justice. And I know I’ve read as I’m sure other people have sort of how this might work in kind of a school based setting with younger people. But can you give a few examples of what some of these sort of non carceral measures for accountability, safety and well being might be on a broader scale or for adults?
Cheryl Conner 8:09
Yes, definitely. The I’m going to define restorative justice for the listeners who may not have read anything. So restorative justice is non punitive, non retribution of process to address interpersonal harm, and it centers the survivors of the harm and bringing everyone together who’s been affected to decide collectively how to heal and repair the harm? And yes, you’re right, this has been tried most when you like, look to the literature and the evidence base in school settings, and also in the juvenile detention system. And not as much in the adult system, although certainly it could be translated there. And what it looks like in the juvenile detention system is, you know, a lot of times it’s really just bringing the person who was affected, and the youth as well as community members and families together to discuss sort of what do we think repairing this harm looks like, but it can also be things like giving someone a caution and then diverting them into mental health treatment or substance use treatment, if that’s part of it. And I think that one that sometimes when you talk about restorative justice, you know, one of the main push backs that people give is that, you know, well, what about like the survivors? Are you you have this pie in the sky idea, and the survivors of interpersonal violence? Really, you know, what do they actually want and you can’t speak for them? Well, first of all, many of us are, are victims of various crimes from property crimes to violent crimes. But there is actually a lot of data that out there that shows that survivors themselves really want. They want to repair the harm by getting accountability. They they favor restitution and rehabilitation over retribution. And so I think that like we actually are listening to survivors now is like a big part of our policy statement was pointing out that actually, we’re following the lead of the people who are most affected by interpersonal violence. And, you know, you can think about it within your own family or within your own school, you know, you probably don’t want that kid that got in a fight with your kid just suspended out the blue, you want them to get the help they need for the family issues they’re having for the trauma, the experiences, the childhood, the substance use issues of their parents, whatever it may be, right, you don’t really just want to be like, you know, kick them out, lock them up, you know, and so it’s trying to picture that and do that on a broader scale. And I do think that actually, recently, we have seen some moves towards that with the opioid epidemic and trying to do more drug treatment, and then just always locking people up, which is a good first step.
Jess Williams 10:58
That’s great. Those are really good examples. So moving on to sort of what are some of the sort of most pressing policy changes that you think sort of individuals and our listeners can support now to move towards these broader goals?
Cheryl Conner 11:16
Oh, yeah, there’s so much stuff we can all be. Well, I think that there’s some low hanging fruit and stuff that has already been started in some places in the country would be things like eliminating cash bail, and pretrial detention. These are things that disproportionately impact black and brown people and poor people, and are also before anyone has even been, like convicted of actually any sort of crime. And then I think that we should also be thinking more and some places have done this about like decriminalizing certain stuff, there’s a lot of things that really, we need to treat with prevention and not retribution, not incarceration, such as like, possession of substances, homelessness, sex work, things like this, that, like, we just need to decriminalize those things. So we don’t feed people into the criminal legal system. And then I think that like, depending on you know, so you could be advocating for those kinds of policies in your, in your local government area. And then I think we also, a lot of us probably are clinicians, and researchers, and you can find ways to like, intervene on these issues in your research and your work in your classes, bringing them up, helping public health recognize this as a big problem and think about, you know, activating people to work on it. And then even like, in my hospital, for example, there is an interaction sometimes between law enforcement and patients and so like also imagining hyper locally and your job and your school. What does that look like? And can we, you know, disrupt that. So those are those would be some of my as some of our ideas.
Jess Williams 13:01
Great. And do you have any sort of resources where folks who want to get sort of more or become more aware of kind of these issues and like what they can do? Oh, yeah, particular group or website or anything like that, that might shed some light on these issues?
Cheryl Conner 13:13
I think the policy statement we wrote for APHA, which is available on at APHA website has a ton of really good resources and references and some of them. I think if you go through them, you can find some great, like nonprofits and NGOs that are doing work around this and have like data and great infographics that could be used in classes, or at like local board meetings, and things like that. So I would direct people to our policy statement at PHA and also to ending police violence.com.
Jess Williams 14:02
That’s great. And we’ll definitely include those links with a blog post where this podcast will be located. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.
Cheryl Conner 14:12
It was my pleasure. Thank you. Bye bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Jess Williams