����vlog����

A Discussion with Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, Keri Blakinger, Ingrid Binswanger, and Craig Waleed

October 23, 2024

This event was recorded and the recording will be available here in the near future.

The carceral healthcare system consists of hundreds of disparate institutions with distinct and complex recordkeeping practices that use both electronic and paper health records, public and private funding of health care services, and support varying degrees of access to available medications and treatments. In this fourth session of the Diagnosis of Incarceration speaker series we tackle the challenge of collecting data around health disparities in the U.S. criminal legal system, a realm where data is often deliberately obscured. We will explore how when we are able to capture and interpret carceral health data, it pushes the boundaries of what we know about the impact of incarceration on health, and how system opacity and data manipulation on the part of carceral institutions render the health crisis of their patient populations invisible to public scrutiny and policy intervention. In particular, the COVID pandemic created a small window of transparency through which the world learned of the disproportionate death rates for those in custody and exceptionally disturbing trends in infectious disease exposure and vulnerability. By pairing an examination of innovative research methodologies and data collection strategies such as those created in the midst of the COVID pandemic with investigative human-first journalism practices, we aim to illuminate the urgent need for transparency in counting those who don’t always get counted, or accurately so.

Speakers

Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. She is a national expert in examining how the criminal legal system impacts people, families, and communities. During the pandemic, she co-founded the COVID Prison Project, one of the only national data projects that tracks and analyzes COVID testing, cases, and deaths in prison systems across the country. She utilized the infrastructure of the COVID Prison Project to recently launch the —a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded big data project that tracks and aggregates publicly available health and health policy data from carceral systems. Additionally, Dr. Brinkley-Rubinstein is the PI of several NIH and foundation grants focused on substance use, HIV prevention, and mortality. In 2019, she co-edited a special issue of AJPH that explored how mass incarceration is a socio-structural determinant of health and more recently was invited by the National Academy of Medicine to attend its Annual Emerging Leaders Forum. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, CNN, Science Magazine, and other media outlets. Her work blends research and policy, which has recently culminated in providing expert consultation to congress relevant to prison standards and data reporting.

Keri Blakinger is a journalist and the author of the , a memoir tracing her path from figure skating to heroin addiction to prison and, finally, to life as an investigative reporter covering mass incarceration. She has written for the Marshall Project, the Houston Chronicle, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, VICE, the New York Daily News and The New York Times. Blakinger was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her feature

Dr. Ingrid A. Binswanger is a Senior Clinician Investigator at the at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, a Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and Adjunct Professor of Health Systems Science at the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the health of people who have been involved with the criminal legal system. She also tests interventions to reduce the medical complications of substance use and improve addiction medicine health services. Dr. Binswanger serves as a Senior Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Addiction. She practices Addiction Medicine at Kaiser Permanente Colorado.

Craig Waleed, EdD joined Disability Rights North Carolina in May 2022. He serves as project manager for project, which  is part of the national Unlock the Box Campaign Against Solitary Confinement. Craig is an educator, counselor, certified Restorative Practices group facilitator, author, and motivational speaker. He is dedicated to excellence in teaching, scholarship, and disrupting the community-to-prison pipeline. Craig‘s passion led him to work closely with students on several college campuses and participate in several community panels exploring carceral matters. He is devoted to educating and motivating others to challenge and overcome many of life’s impediments in order to live a more rewarding experience. His career journey includes serving as a substance abuse counselor, developing and managing reentry initiatives for post-incarcerated citizens, and teaching mental health counseling and communication courses at The College at Brockport State University of New York, and Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY. Craig completed his doctoral studies in Executive Leadership from St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY. His autobiography, Prison to Promise: A Chronicle of Healing and Transformation was published in August of 2020.