Social Justice & Community
New book explains the public health costs of prisons and policing
Assistant Professor Carlos Martinez’s latest co-edited book explores the public health impacts of punitive policing, incarceration, and deportation policies and describes how the abolitionist health justice movement is working toward a new, more just vision of “safety” that protects, rather than harms, the health and wellbeing of our society’s most vulnerable people.
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Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino studies Carlos Martinez is a medical anthropologist and affiliated faculty member with UCSC’s Global and Community Health Program, whose work often focuses on the health consequences of policing, incarceration, and deportation. His latest co-edited book, All This Safety Is Killing Us: Health Justice Beyond Prisons, Police, and Borders, explores the public health impacts of punitive policies that disproportionately impact Black and brown people, trans and queer people, people with disabilities, people with mental health diagnoses, people with substance use disorders, and survivors of trauma and abuse.
The book describes how the abolitionist health justice movement is working toward a new, more just vision of “safety” that protects, rather than harms, the health and wellbeing of our society’s most vulnerable people. The UC Santa Cruz news team interviewed Martinez to discuss the underlying issues with our current punitive systems and how we could all benefit from change.
To start with, could you give some examples of the types of health concerns that are most commonly associated with prisons?
Several studies have indicated that incarceration devastates the physical and mental health of prisoners as well as their families. Compared to the general population, incarcerated people experience higher rates of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, asthma, arthritis, and cancer.
As was made brutally evident during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, prisons are also breeding grounds for a wide range of infectious diseases due to their poor ventilation and overcrowding. Moreover, as Aminah Elster, a long-time advocate for women prisoners, and her colleagues describe in painstaking detail in one of the book’s chapters, prisoners are routinely victimized by systemic acts of medical violence and neglect, reproducing the trauma and abuse that many of them already experienced prior to incarceration.
And how do public health impacts extend beyond prison walls?
We know that policing and deportation are disease-producing practices. Aside from the physical violence associated with policing, people who experience abuse on behalf of law enforcement exhibit higher levels of mental distress and biological markers of stress, such as shortened telomeres. Men who have been stopped by police more often in their lifetimes are three times more likely to exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Simply living in a neighborhood where invasive policing practices are more prevalent has been shown to make individuals more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, diabetes, and other health issues.
Similarly, deportation and even the mere threat of deportation are associated with increased levels of mental distress, anxiety, and high blood pressure among undocumented individuals. Moreover, children with one or more deported parents experience a significant deterioration in their mental and physical health.
What are healthcare providers doing to respond to these issues?
Across the country, clinicians, public health advocates, and medical students have allied with grassroots organizations to halt the expansion of carceral institutions and call for alternative models of care and transformative justice. This book was inspired by these activities and emerged as a collaborative effort to document, expand upon, and propagate this growing area of research, practice, and activism to a broader public.
Collectively, the contributors to this edited volume seek not only to document the harms to health produced by mass criminalization but to demonstrate that a different way forward is possible, and that those of us working within the public health, clinical, and mental health care fields have critical roles to play in that project. As this book discusses, clinicians are organizing inside emergency departments, intensive care units, community health centers, and other sites of care to limit and remove the presence and influence of policing and surveillance.
What do you hope people will ultimately learn from reading this book?
We’re currently in a moment where the notion of “increasing safety” is being used to justify all kinds of atrocities. I hope this book makes clear that the carceral structures that have been ostensibly created to keep us safe come not only at a tremendous financial cost, but also at the cost of our nation’s public health. Moreover, they are ineffective at their stated goal. People in the United States are less safe and have poorer health outcomes than people in similar nations. For example, the United States has the highest homicide rate compared to other wealthy industrialized nations, which experience a fraction of this country’s violence.
While the financial cost to support these bloated carceral systems has only grown, throughout the country, municipalities and states have seen their budgets for other critical social services, including education and public health, consistently cut in recent decades. The abolitionist health justice movement is working to reverse this trend.