Amend's Cyrus Ahalt and Dr. Brie Williams on Transforming Correctional Systems

In a recent essay for Vital City, Cyrus Ahalt and Dr. Brie Williams detail Amend's public health and human rights-focused work to transform broken carceral systems.

Providing an array of practiced-based antecedents, the essay points to work by international organizations to examine and reshape approaches to public health, safety, and rehabilitation that can help transform carceral systems and institutions for the benefit of incarcerated people, carceral staff, and their communities.

Cyrus Ahalt is the chief program officer for Amend at UCSF, a public health and human rights program that works in prisons to reduce their debilitating health effects on residents and staff, while also joining policy makers and community leaders to advance decarceration strategies and a better, new system of accountability and healing in the US. Amend was founded by Dr. Brie Williams, ARC's Associate Director for Policy, professor of medicine in the Division of Health Equity & Society in the UCSF School of Medicine, and founding director of Amend at UCSF.