CHMP

Healthstyles
Special Membership Drive Program
Wednesday, February 8th 10 AM to 12:00 PM
99.5 FM Pacifica Radio
The show is streamed live or can be listened after it airs on the site in archives.
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or
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Diana Mason and Barbara Glickstein co-host this two-hour special, “Prison”

Fact: The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
Fact: Today over 150,000 women are incarcerated in the U.S., 85% of these women are mothers and 2.3 million children under the age of eighteen have a parent in prison.
Fact: Drug related crimes: around half of all inmates in federal prisons are there for drugs, around 20% of inmates nationwide in state prisons are there for drugs.

Guest Daliah Heller, PhD, MPH, is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Health Media and Policy (CHMP) at Hunter College. She is working this year on identifying and promoting opportunities for mainstreaming substance use services in health care and public health systems. “The negative health and social consequences of drug use can be devastating for individuals, families, and communities. To change this, we must shift from treating it as a criminal problem to recognizing it as the health and public health problem that can be prevented and managed.”

How can the public health model of prevention stop mass incarceration? Ernest Drucker, public health scholar, Soros Justice Fellow, and senior research associate at John Jay College of Criminal Justice addresses that question in his new book, A Plague of Prisons - The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America. He argues that “Imprisonment has become an epidemic in this country, a destabilizing force that undermines families and communities, damaging the very social structures that prevent crime. He asks audiences, “How many people here know someone who has been in prison?”

Guest Deborah Jiang Stein was born in a federal prison to a heroin-addicted mother. She started The unPrison Project and travels around the country speaking to thousands of incarcerated women. She’s gone back to the federal prison she was born in and tells her story in her newly released book, EVEN TOUGH GIRLS WEAR TUTUS: Inside the World of a Woman Born in Prison.

Tune in this Wednesday to hear this special segment.

Daliah Heller

Former NYC Assistant Commissioner Daliah Heller, PhD, MPH, joins the Center for Health Media and Policy (CHMP) at Hunter College this year as a Visiting Scholar. She is initiating a project, entitled SHIFT – Shaping Health Initiatives For Transformation (SHIFT) on drugs and alcohol – to promote opportunities for mainstreaming substance use services in health care and public health systems.  This fulltime position is funded by a grant from the Open Society.

Over the year, Dr. Heller’s work will involve two main activities. First, she will be interviewing and organizing doctors and nurses from around the country to build support for integrating substance use into health care systems and improving drug and alcohol policies. Second, she will be exploring and advocating health policy approaches for substance use services.

Heller sees this work as crucial for helping people with drug and alcohol problems. “The negative health and social consequences of drug use can be devastating for individuals, families, and communities. To change this, we must shift from treating it as a criminal problem to recognizing it as the health and public health problem that can be prevented and managed.”

Daliah Heller has worked at the intersection of public health and substance use for the past fifteen years in New York City. Her work spans leadership roles in both the governmental and not-for-profit sectors, and includes developing and managing community-based programs, conducting epidemiologic research and program evaluation, implementing system-wide initiatives, and analyzing and advancing public policy. Most recently, until November 2011, she served four years as an Assistant Commissioner at the New York City Health Department, responsible for the Bureau of Alcohol and Drug Use Prevention, Care, and Treatment.