Physician and Anthropologist Proposes Nationwide ‘Decapitation’ Program in New England Journal of Medicine
What are the alternatives to police and prisons to keep us safe and prevent violence in the United States?
Following the murder of Tyre Nichols and the ongoing debate over the US public security system, Eric Reinhart, MD, of Northwestern Medicine, outlines such a plan.
Reinhart New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) Creation of a new federal division in charge of community safety and remediation to lead a nationwide “execution” program.
The program is made possible by employing 2 million community health and justice workers (giving priority employment to those previously incarcerated).
“The dire state of public health and safety in the United States is fundamentally intertwined, and neither can be separated from the devastating consequences of mass incarceration,” said Northwestern University resident physician in psychiatry and behavioral sciences. Scientist Reinhart said. “We need to stop treating health and safety as separate policy domains. To build either public health or safety in America, we must build both at the same time.” This requires a new approach to supporting the community from within.
“This investment in human infrastructure will improve community security and provide community-based care for people with disabilities and those with severe mental illness, while gradually replacing unproductive reliance on police and prisons. It is essential to building an effective system to protect and restore long-term health, and the economic toll that mass incarceration has wreaked on many of the more than 77 million people in the United States with criminal convictions. “
The special 2,800-word NEJM report is titled ‘Reconstructive Justice – Public Health Policies to End Mass Incarceration’.
In the report, Reinhart outlines the scale of the widely neglected role that incarceration has undermined public health and healthcare in the United States, both before and during COVID-19.
“The evidence also shows how poor public health and healthcare systems exacerbate crime, violence, arrests and incarceration,” Reinhart said.
Reinhardt reframes the prison abolition movement as a necessary rebuilding project that not only dismantles repressive institutions, but builds enough community-based care infrastructure to render police and prisons obsolete.
Reinhart is working with Illinois government officials to secure funding for a pilot program to implement the community health and justice personnel model he describes in the NEJM article.
“Building on the established success of community health worker programs to improve health outcomes and reduce health care costs, we are working with communities in Illinois to improve these underutilized programs. It demonstrates that health is not the only benefit that can bring to communities,” said Reinhart. “They are also essential for shared safety for everyone, not just the privileged few.”
The hope, he says, is to use Illinois as a proof-of-concept site to help spread the paradigm across the country.
Original: How Public Health Programs Obsolete Police and Prisons
Than: Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
