Re-directing our resources in health and criminal justice

For decades, healthcare professionals and advocates have recognized the importance of "social determinants of health" that are beyond the scope of clinical practice and hospital care. Starting with fetal and childhood adverse conditions, and throughout one's life time, diseases and stress-related illnesses are more associated with unsafe environment and poor housing, limited access to good nutrition, education, recreation, jobs, and healthcare services than with genetic factors. Having good hospitals is important, but they often function as fancy and expensive "repair shops" owned by for-profit corporations and are now the greatest cost figures in our health expenditures. 

We are now having a similar re-examination of the role of police and our entire criminal justice system. They have never been effective as deterrent to bad behavior, nor accountable for their social class bias and abuse of force, whether the systemic violence is a knee over someone's neck or a harsher sentencing of marginalized individuals. In practice they ignore the "social determinants of criminality" while deepening injustice and increasing human and societal costs.

I see a historical parallel between the failure of previous half-hearted police and healthcare "reform" measures. There is now a unique opportunity to address in tandem the above social determinants of ill health and crime, their solutions coming down to similar moral and practical interventions. We can, and must shift the huge expenditures we are now spending on our police "forces" and hospital excesses toward investment in our community social services and our preventive public health outreach.

(Submitted to the Gazette Times, Corvallis, June 13, and published on June 25, 2020)