The deputy professor of Latin American and Latin studies Carlos Martinez is a medical anthropologist, whose work often focuses on the consequences on police, imprisonment and deportation. His latest co-edited book, All this security kills us: the justice of health beyond prisons, the police and the bordersExplore the impacts on the public health of punitive policies which have a disproportionate black and brown impact, trans and queer people, disabled people, people with mental health diagnoses, people suffering from disorders of the consumption of substances and survivors of trauma and abuse.
The book describes how the abolitionist movement of health justice works towards a new, fairer vision of “security” that protects, rather than the damage, health and well-being of the most vulnerable people in our society. The UC Santa Cruz News team interviewed Martinez to discuss underlying problems with our current punitive systems and how we could all benefit from the change.
To start, could you give some examples of the types of health problems that are most often associated with prisons?
Several studies have indicated that imprisonment devastates the physical and mental health of prisoners and their families. Compared to the general population, imprisoned persons experience higher rates of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, asthma, arthritis and cancer.
As was made brutally obvious during the first stages of the COVVI-19 pandemic, prisons are also reproductive reasons for a wide range of infectious diseases due to their poor ventilation and overcrowding. In addition, as a minah Elster, a long -standing defender of prisoner women, and his colleagues describe with meticulous details in one of the chapters of the book, prisoners are regularly victims by systemic acts of medical violence and negligence, reproducing the trauma and the abuse that many of them have already undergone before imprisonment.
And how do the impacts on public health extend beyond the walls of the prison?
We know that the police and expulsion are disease -producing practices. In addition to the physical violence associated with police services, people who have abuse on behalf of the police have higher levels of mental distress and organic stress markers, such as shortened telomeres. Men who have been arrested by police more often in their lifetime are three times more likely to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Living in a neighborhood has been shown to live in a district where invasive police practices are more widespread to make individuals more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, diabetes and other health problems.
Likewise, deportation and even the simple threat of expulsion are associated with increased levels of mental distress, anxiety and high blood pressure in undocumented individuals. In addition, children with one or more deported parents have a significant deterioration in their mental and physical health.
What do health care providers do to answer these questions?
Around the country, clinicians, defenders of public health and medical students have combined with basic organizations to stop the expansion of prison institutions and call for alternative models of care and transformative justice. This book was inspired by these activities and emerged as an effort of collaboration to document, develop and propagate this growing field of research, practice and activism to a wider audience.
Collectively, contributors to this published volume not only seek to document health damages produced by mass criminalization, but also to demonstrate that a different way to follow is possible, and that of us who work in the fields of public, clinical and mental health have essential roles to play in this project. As this book discusses, clinicians organize themselves within emergency services, intensive care units, community health centers and other care sites to limit and abolish the presence and influence of the police and surveillance.
What do you hope that people will finally learn by reading this book?
We are currently at a time when the concept of “growing security” is used to justify all kinds of atrocities. I hope that this book clearly indicates that the prison structures that have been ostensibly created to protect us not only at a huge financial cost, but also at the price of public health in our country. In addition, they are ineffective to their declared objective. In the United States, people are less safe and have less good health results than people in similar countries. For example, the United States has the highest homicide rate compared to other rich industrialized nations, which are experiencing a fraction of the violence in this country.
Although the financial cost to support these inflated prison systems has only increased, throughout the country, municipalities and states have seen their budgets for other critical social services, including public education and health, have constantly reduced in recent decades. The abolitionist Health Justice Movement strives to reverse this trend.