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Education

Community health workers Jerry Smart and Monya Saunders canvassing in New Haven to connect and educate community members to Transitions Clinic’s services.

Our education initiatives provide training in health equity research and community engagement and expand opportunities for hands-on experience and mentoring for people with a history of incarceration, Yale University students and medical trainees. We partner with correctional systems, the Transition Clinic Network (TCN), and institutions across Yale to offer unique educational opportunities. By doing so, our Center aims to build the leadership of individuals with a history of incarceration to lead transformation in their own communities, as well as a cadre of Yale students and trainees equipped to tackle the racial and ethnic inequities of mass incarceration through scholarship, clinical care, and policy work.

Our work involves developing curricula to center the health of those impacted by incarceration in medical education.

  • We have partnered with Dr. Carmen Black at the Yale School of Medicine and Women Against Mass Incarceration on a grant from the Association of American Medical Colleges to undertake the Depart Initiative: Detained Patients Advocacy and Rights throughout Treatment. The goal is to produce an interdisciplinary curriculum and clinical care pathway including a Patient Bill of Rights that would minimize police involvement for hospitalized people who are accompanied by law enforcement.
  • We have partnered with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Kingdom Health Security Agency to develop two mini courses available to correctional healthcare workers in over 30 countries, educating on both infectious disease and non-communicable disease care in carceral facilities. Learn more about the infection disease course on the WHO website.

We regularly host educational webinars and seminars on the health impact of mass incarceration, which are open to the public. You can learn about upcoming webinars by enrolling in our email listserv. To view previous webinars, see below. All videos are also available on our YouTube channel.

What's Cash Got To Do With It? Guaranteed Income & the Health of People Returning from Incarceration

On April 18th, 2023, 1 PM - 2:30 PM ET, the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice at the Yale School of Medicine hosted a webinar focused on cash assistance programs for individuals leaving incarceration. The webinar provided an overview on the need for cash assistance programs for this population and discuss the implementation of such programs. Panelists included academic researchers studying cash assistance programs, advocates and administrators of such programs, and recipients of cash assistance programs following incarceration. The intended audience was individuals and communities impacted by incarceration, reentry groups, social service organizations, academic researchers, and community members in this topic. This event was co-sponsored by the Columbia Justice Lab, the Justice Collaboratory at the Yale Law School, and 4-CT.

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COVID, Isolation, & Incarceration

This video offers a glimpse of what it was like to be incarcerated during the pandemic. These voices were captured through 100 interviews we conducted with incarcerated people, correctional and medical staff at three facilities in the United States in 2020 and 2021. They bear witness to the deep impact of isolation, quarantine and lockdowns on incarcerated people.

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SEICHE Center International Perspectives on COVID-19 Mitigation Strategies Inside Prisons

An international team of researchers share new work on experiences of COVID-19 in incarcerated populations. 0:00 Welcome 4:48 Introduction by Doug Dretke 17:40 Modeling to guide introduction and cessation of COVID control measures in the Australian prisons (Prof Andrew Lloyd MD,PhD) 42:35 The effectiveness of interventions to reduce COVID-19 transmission in a large urban jail (Giovanni Malloy PhD) 1:11:20 COVID-19 en el Sistema Penitenciario de la República Dominicana (General Tomas Holguin La Paz) 1:30:45 Role of Mobile Applications within Corrections in Age of COVID-19: Video Observed Therapy (VOT) to support medication adherence among incarcerated persons (Richard Garfein PhD, MPH; Kelly Collins PhD, MPH) 1:55:05 Q&A

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