Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, of the Department of Social Medicine and the Center for Health Equity Research, UNC Chapel Hill, will discuss how mass incarceration impacts individual and population health during "Mass Incarceration as a Multi-Level Driver of Health Inequities" on August 26 from 3:30 to 5 p.m., on Zoom.

The presentation will focus on the following: 

• The connection between conditions of confinement and health
• Health outcomes that are over-represented in carceral populations (e.g., opioid use disorder and overdose, and COVID-19)
• New projects to continue to illuminate the criminal legal system's impact on health

About the Speaker
Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein is an associate professor in the Department of Social Medicine and the Center for Health Equity Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work centers on the criminal legal system and health and how mass incarceration is a structural driver of health disparities. She is the PI of several NIH-funded projects including an NIMHD R01 cohort study following people on probation and parole who are at risk for HIV, a NIDA-funded U01 that is investigating the impact of a peer support intervention on uptake and access to medications for opioid use disorder, and another NIDA-funded U01 that is developing best practices for COVID-19 testing and vaccine deployment in jails and prisons. She is also the founder of the COVID Prison Project, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which has become the go-to source of information for COVID-19 incidence in carceral settings across the country.