
Cynthia Golembeski
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About Cynthia
Golembeski’s research focuses on how policy, law, and management operate at the intersection of criminal legal and health systems. Overarching themes in her writings include citizen state relations amidst bureaucratic disentitlement, administrative burdens, and political determinants of health, economic, and social outcomes. Golembeski serves as an Assistant Instructor with Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs and teaches in prisons. She serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Correctional Health Care, Public Integrity, World Medical & Health Policy, and Harvard Review of Public Health.
Contributions
In the News
Publications
Provides background on bail and pretrial justice policies and politics; outlines evidence of related consequences; describes select reform efforts and philanthropic tools, including the charitable bail organization The Bail Project; and contextualizes bail and pretrial justice within a public values framework, which centers social equity and incorporates critical race theory alongside politics and public ethics of care.
Discusses how policymakers and health professionals can advance understanding and mitigate present and anticipated public health threats by increasing transparency, accountability, and human rights protections with an emphasis on decarceration and decarbonization.
Elaborates on how bans and eligibility modifications for people with felony drug convictions limit SNAP benefit access. Discusses how food insecurity, recidivism, and poor mental and physical health outcomes are positively associated with such bans.
Discusses how misinformation amplified by political elites can lead to an increase in racism and discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities and other populations who experience vulnerabilities.
Explores how health and economic inequities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately harm women, and particularly women of color, involved in the criminal legal system.
Discusses how over 1,000,000 women are under supervision of the U.S. criminal legal system. Outlines how with increased numbers in prison there are direct or indirect health effects impacting families and communities due to these increases.
Discusses how "In Life and Death in Rikers Island," Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer for New York City’s jails, performs a social autopsy of the “inaccessible island colony of nine jails on Rikers Island” and reveals the “deadly and long-lasting health risks of jail.” Addresses the analysis of the health risks of incarceration, with attention toward politics, policy, and power, necessitating a moral imperative to the problems of healthcare within the context of mass incarceration.