Oral

The emerging framework of Epidemiological Criminology recognizes that Criminal Justice and Public Health have become inextricably linked in industrialized societies. Individual justice as an end-product has been the ideal outcome of the criminal justice process since the formalization of checks and balances. Social justice as an outcome, for example, has been an imperative in the field of public health. Endemic to both criminal justice and public health is the issue of disparity that transcends both systems and lexicon. Social justice, a term rooted in religious and organized labor philosophies, has played a key role in criminal justice since the 1960s and various “radical” or “critical” criminological theories. On the criminal justice side, differential minority and low-income involvement, representation, and impact in the system have been topics of concern and research since the “war on poverty” and “war on crime” era during the 1967 “Presidential Commission on Crime”. This was also one of the first documents, and certainly the first presidential commission, to introduce a public health perspective to the study of criminal justice. Since this time, the social justice ethos has taken deeper root in public health since the arrival of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Risk factor analysis for both criminogenic and health behaviors have helped to form a loose bridge between criminal justice and public health during the last two decades. This session will present research addressing the connections between crime and the public’s health, to include some unanticipated consequences when systems of justice overlook the broader impact of youth violence and gang participation.

Session Objectives: 1. To understand the relationship between social justice and public health from a transdisciplinary perspective; 2. To identify theoretical models used to assess social, public health, and justice disparities; 3. To critically learn how to analyze complex social systems that transcends health and crime for theory development and practice when confronted against unanticipated events.

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH)