Carcerality as a Social Determinant of Death

• In Event: Mortality, Health, and Justice Involvement

Abstract

Emerging public health approaches to criminology focus on ways that policing practices and policies and other related carceral institutions, such as prisons, lead to detrimental health consequences for BIPOC communities. Police murder is one of the most common examples, but there are other types of suffering that emanate from racial profiling and other forms of criminalization at the hands of the carceral state that can lead to death. Currently there is little research on how criminalization and incarceration are implicated in detrimental health outcomes, including but not limited to death, for California youth. This paper centers the carceral experiences of Juandi, a Latino young man was first arrested at age 12 for stealing a bottle of alcohol, which led to a decade of carceral involvement that ended only with his death due to complications from alcohol use at age 25. Juandi was interviewed as part of a qualitative grounded theory of adults who had been incarcerated as adolescents. Findings from that study highlight ways in which criminalization, dehumanization, and disregard are implicated in figurative and literal death. This paper ends with an exploration of how a public health approach to youth substance use is an effective alternative to carceral approaches.

Author

• Gabriela Medina Falzone, California State University, Chico