Seeing the institutional in the individual: Participatory practices and the prison industrial complex

Programs inside prisons and jails have been shown to build resiliency and self-understanding (“hurt people hurt people”) that contributes to decreased rates of recidivism. These programs, which work with people who have caused harm (i.e. ‘violent offenders’) often draw upon principles of restorative justice that focus powerfully on the traumatic effects of interpersonal violence for all involved. There is a crucial pivot point however at the intersection of individual and institutional violence that is often less articulated in attempts to focus “the inside” as the primary site of public health intervention. When divorced from the broader public health impacts of the expanding prison industrial complex, these programs can often become justifications for, ‘more jails that are better’, as is currently the case in San Francisco.

In work in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York city with families impacted by incarceration and students living in communities targeted by aggressive policing, social epidemiology and participatory action research provide methods for investigating intersections of individual and institutional violence. These projects seek to ask, how do populations and geographies targeted by the prison industrial complex organize resources and networks to support community safety and health? What are the broader public health impacts of familial fragmentation due to incapacitation? What are the needs and assets for multilevel models of health in relationship to the prison industrial complex and violence?