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Please note this event will take place on Tuesday, not Wednesday. Please join PCLP in a discussion on "FESTER: Carceral Permeability and California's COVID-19 Correctional Disaster." PCLP will welcome Professor and author Hadar Avarim of UC Hastings College of Law and our very own Professor Wendy Epstein. The two of them will discuss not only the mismanagement of COVID-19 within the US but specifically in California's prisons as it stands out as the worst medical prison catastrophe in the state's history. Three-quarters of the state's prison population was infected; 255 incarcerated people and 50 staff members died. Socio-legal scholar Hadar Aviram and data scientist Chad Goerzen's forthcoming book FESTER exposes the COVID-19 correctional experience through hundreds of first-person accounts, months of courtroom observations, years of carefully collected quantitative COVID-19 data, and a wealth of policy documents. Against the backdrop of decades of systemic vulnerabilities of overcrowding and abysmal healthcare, the book recounts the suffering that COVID-19 and its mismanagement wrought behind bars--the fruit of neglect, incompetence, fearmongering, sabotage, and dehumanization. FESTER bears witness to the immense suffering we bring on ourselves and our fellow humans through dehumanization, fear, and ignorance, and stands as a monument for a brave coalition of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, family members and loved ones, advocates and activists, doctors and journalists, who worked to shed light on one of the Golden State's correctional system's darkest times.
Register in advance for this meeting: https://arizona.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIpcu-gqT8iH9wJ6F5rkw51NG7wV2… Food will be provided in the courtyard at 11:45 am. We hope to see you!