By Keon L. Gilbert and Jerrell DeCaille
The health justice movement helps to marry social justice models with equity frameworks.
This critical partnership advances health equity through community-based approaches to health care and social services, collaborations that minimize duplicative services, and the creation of sustainable relationships to advocate for systemic change.
By Osagie K. Obasogie
One idea that distinguishes public health from medicine and other health sciences is the social determinants of health. This concept emphasizes the environmental conditions that give rise to health outcomes — poverty, lack of access to resources, exposures to contaminants, etc. — rather than locating disease solely in biological or physiological processes bounded by human bodies. Following this lead, public health interventions are often focused on community practices that can improve the spaces in which people live. The public health approach is refreshingly simple: healthy communities and environments produce healthy people.
A public health framework for understanding how police and policing impact community health outcomes is necessary as we continue to have wide-ranging conversations about excessive use of force. Improving the health of local communities involves rethinking the laws that govern how police interact with the people they serve.
By Keon Gilbert
About 1.5 million Black men are missing from daily life because of health challenges, economic instability, and over-policing. There are several complex determinants that explain these disproportionate patterns of incarceration and premature mortality, which are fundamentally interlinked.