Why

Invitation / Action

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Reflection Questions

Reflect

Research

Practice

Imagine

Treatment in jails, prisons and detention facilities is not only substandard, but coercive, invasive, and violent.
Practices include (but are not limited to): shackling pregnant people during labor and delivery, use of restraints, non consensual forced feeding, inadequate access to care and treatment, forced sterilization, coercive treatment by health care staff, neglect and disregard of health care needs or illness or injuries.

If you work in these facilities call out abusive or coercive practices in health care
Refuse to provide care in a cage and instead demand transfers to accredited, accessible and quality health care facilities
Join decarceration campaigns working towards closing down jails, prisons, and detention facilities

Decarceration During COVID-19 Messaging Toolkit - Human Impact Partners
Leveraging Governmental Public Health Tools to Address the Harms of the Criminal Legal System - Human Impact Partners and Critical Resistance
Read and discuss how “carceral humanism” and the oxymoronic “feminist jails” are contradictions in terms
Join campaigns to get people free; learn about freedom teams and create your own: Survivor Defense as Abolitionist Praxis - Survived and Punished
Read “Engaged in Life: Alan Berkman on Prison Health Care (as told to Susie Day) in The New Abolitionists: Neo-slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings, Joy James (State University of New York Press: Albany, 2005) pages 289-294
Read “Prison as a Tool for Reproductive Oppression: Cross-Movement Strategies for Gender Justice” by Gabriel Arkles
Learn more about ongoing work to Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP) and End youth incarceration (Project Nia), and the work of HEARD

How do we balance the fight between making sure that people currently incarcerated have access to adequate health care while fighting for the abolition of prisons?
What kind of care do you believe people in prisons, jails and detention centers receive? What barriers do you see to providing quality, accessible care to incarcerated people?
What legacies of work by and in solidarity with criminalized and incarcerated people to demand care - and freedom as care - are we building on?

What standards of care for incarcerated people exist in your state (i.e. can incarcerated pregnant people be shackled during labor and delivery?) How are they enforced? What role do health care providers play in enforcing them?
Watch HEARD’s documentary ‘Deaf in Prison’
'Watch ‘The Perils of Private Prison Health Care’ The Perils of Private Prison Health Care | Full Documentary

What is the jail, prison system, or detention center in your area? What is your institution's policy with respect to treatment of people who are incarcerated/in police/ICE custody - in terms of shackles, police/prison guard presence during treatment/in treatment areas, confidentiality, etc.? What are the common practices? How might you change this policy/these practices to improve care for incarcerated people/people in custody?
Start a pen pal relationship with someone in prison through programs like Black and Pink and Abolition Apostles Penpal Programs
If you are a health care provider, support the Transgender Law Center in their efforts to put together cases about denial of medical care in prison, and volunteer to be part of their Medical Expert Network