Search

Cudahy elementary school’s struggle for environmental justice foregrounds how sites of industrialization connect to organization of schools and other public institutions. I am curious about the work of organizations involved in the struggle–Cudahy Alliance for Justice, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice (EYCEJ). I am also curious about the tactics and strategies used by these individuals and organizations to attain recognitional justice (being heard and listened to): how did they get DTSC and the school district to get them to listen? Further, the latter half of the story focuses on the proposed construction of a charter school nearby the elementary school: How do environmental governance and education restructuring shape each other?

The podcast episode tells the story of the Park View Elementary School in Cudahy, LA County. Located on a former toxic dump, parents and educators have been involved in decades’ long fight to remediate and clean up the school land. That fight has not been easy. They have encountered an apathetic school district and a slowly-moving Dept. of Toxic Substances Control.  The coalition of parents, educators, and activists gained traction by collaborating with Spanish language media productions. The school closed down for a cleanup and reopened in 2001, but students and educators still reported feeling sick. They later found out that the cleanup had been planned to be short-term and a longer remediation plan was underway. Many parents shifted schools. The story continued with the proposal to build a charter school just a few miles away from the elementary school and from a former Exide battery recycling plant. The podcast offers a narrative-style discussion of cumulative impacts, mapping tools that make it possible to visualize different datasets to display disproportionate burdens, and structural and recognitional injustices that the parents and educators faced.

The mission statement of the Center for Prisioner Health and Human Rights is as follows:

"The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights seeks to improve the health and human rights of criminal justice populations through education, research, and advocacy."

The center's directors, members, and volunteers establish specific priorities on how this mission is going to be approached. Their current focuses as stated on their website are as follows:

– To bring attention to the health and healthcare issues and challenges of prisoners and other criminal justice populations.
– To improve the continuum of care for prisoners from admission to a correctional facility through release, including improving healthcare access and opportunities for criminal justice populations in the community.
– To advance policies and programs that promote both public health oriented approaches to mental illness, addiction, and substance use and [alternatives to][less reliance on] incarceration and the criminal justice system.
– To engage students and health professionals in the Center’s mission with training and education opportunities, and by providing students with practical experiences working directly on concrete issues, problems, and challenges.

In recent years, incarceration rates and prison populations nationwide have grown exponentially for a variety of sociological and political factors. The organization believes that research indicates that this epidemic has had a particularly hard impact on economically vulnerable communities, where a majority of the people brought into custody suffer from addiction, substance use, and/or mental illness. Due to their economic situation these people were likely unable to seek care or treatment from any public health system in the community. This interaction of illnesses and diseases and criminalization in communities and incarceration results in a complex public health and human rights crisis in both correctional and other criminal justice settings. The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights seeks to apply new research to help to mitigate this.

The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights is located at the Miriam Hospital of The Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

The program is funded in most part by Brown University, and research funding is suplimented by various grants applied for by individual researchers.

The program is focused on educating students and researchers in various methods to further research on the criminal justice system and its associated sociological factors. As of this time, the Center is offering two main educational opportunities, one for summer research interns and one for researchers to participate in a 2 year study on HIV in prisons funded by  the National Institute on Drug Abuse

The programs are targeted at students and health professionals, educating them in the Center’s mission and providing them with training and education opportunities.

No, this program appears to exculsively provide research opportunities for students and practicioners. 

The program is not often featured in the news, however its research and statistics are often cited in a variety of news sources and journals, including The Crime Report, a publication by John Jay College.