Posted on 08/05/2019 5:48:46 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
New York City’s Health Department is warning the public that contact with the criminal justice system — everything from police stops or searches to incarceration to having a jailed relative — poses a public health risk.
“The data show that involvement with the criminal justice system – even brief contact with the police or indirect exposure – is associated with lasting harm to people’s physical and mental health,” said Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, in a statement sent to BuzzFeed News.
The announcement by New York’s public health department follows San Francisco’s Health Commission taking on incarceration as a public health issue in March, and Seattle essentially turning its juvenile justice system over to public health officials in 2017.
“What New York is doing is smart — people don’t often see how the healthcare system and criminal justice are interlinked,” University of Georgia sociologist Sarah Shannon, who studies the health effects of incarceration on prisoners and families. “But especially in our era of mass incarceration, there has been a lot of evidence they have to affect each other.”
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene estimates around 577,000 people, 9% of New Yorkers, have been physically threatened or abused by the police. Overall, 29%, roughly 1.9 million people, report even being stopped, frisked, or questioned by the police.
Those people have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, drug abuse, and mental illness, warns the department, which is starting a new public health campaign focused on educating healthcare workers about chronic health conditions linked to these patients. Around 27% of those formerly incarcerated for example reported poor mental health, compared to 13% among the never incarcerated (the national rate for mental illness is 19%). And 29% of those reporting threats or abuse by the police had poor physical health, against 12% of those who hadn’t.
Inverted cause and effect.
“..said Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, B. “
Oxiris Barbot... that sounds like a Hunter’s Safety Orange penile discharge of some sort.
Bingo! That was my immediate reaction while reading this tripe. You beat me to it.
So don’t commit any crimes, and you’ll be much healthier!
I have an idea. As an interesting social experiment, let’s simply suspend all the laws and any effort at law enforcement in the city of New York. Send all the policemen, detectives, District Attorneys, and officers of the court on an extended vacation to Florida, on the city’s tab. Then if things get better, health wise, then they can forward pink slips to all the vacationers, and a pleasant utopian fall can be had by all.
Of course, if this doesn’t work, it be anyone’s guess how long it will take the New York Fire Dept. to extinguish the smoldering ruins of the hundreds of various looted institutions and stores.
Oxiris Barbot got the city of Baltimore all straitened out - she was doing the same job there from 2010 to 2014.
Good idea but please, Florida has too many New Yorkers. Send them elsewhere.
Living in NYC is detrimental to your health.
Clean up the rats and needles and feces, then.
Endemic is the missing word here. Like cause and effect.
It’s okay. People who work in that sector and become insane will be exempt from weapons confiscations.
If that’s so, just imagine how dangerous it is for the police!
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