Cook Center Faculty Affiliate Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, PhD, was recently quoted in a CNN article about how organs of deceased inmates in Alabama have been removed without family consent. In the article, she states:
“It’s the wild, wild west. There’s no governance. … What that health care should look like, who has bodily autonomy and who doesn’t, and who, when someone dies, acts as next of kin to people who are incarcerated – all those things are just undefined.”
Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein is an Associate Professor of Population Health Sciences. She is a national expert in examining how the criminal legal system impacts people, families, and communities. During the pandemic, she co-founded the COVID Prison Project, one of the only national data projects that tracks and analyzes COVID testing, cases, and deaths in prison systems across the country. She utilized the infrastructure of the COVID Prison Project to recently launch the Third City Project—a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded big data project that tracks and aggregates publicly available health and health policy data from carceral systems.
