Legal Scholarship & Advocacy

The SEICHE Center also aims to shift the systems that disproportionately disenfranchise formerly incarceration populations through legal advocacy efforts on the local, state, and national levels. From changing institutional hiring practices to alternating policies related to decarceration, our Center applies strategies to changing the criminal justice, health, and other social systems that determine how populations impacted by mass incarceration are allowed to embrace healthy, flourishing lives. For example, our Founding Director, Dr. Emily Wang, co-chair a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, & Medicine (NASEM) committee on “Best Practices for Implementing Decarceration as a Strategy to Mitigate the Spread of COVID-19 in Correctional Facilities” and also served on an additional NASEM committee on “The Limits of Recidivism: Measuring Success After Prison."

Our Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP) provides civil legal support to patients seen at our Transitions Clinic programs in Connecticut. The MLP through the Solomon Center at Yale Law School also offers law students in the MLP an opportunity to get involved with legal cases for our patient population as well as more broadly identifying and challenging health-harming policies that impact formerly incarcerated individuals.

The Center also works with the Justice Collaboratory and The Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at the Yale Law School to study how specific laws, practices, and policies impact health outcomes among marginalized groups. These partnerships work to ensure that legal advocacy efforts are robust, rigorous, and grounded in science.