alumni news

‘COVID Has Brought to Light What is Happening Behind Bars’

Alum Dana Rice, assistant professor of the Public Health Leadership Program at UNC Gillings School of Global Health, studies the impact of mass criminalization and mass incarceration on public health.

“You can’t understand racism in this country without having a conversation about mass incarceration and what that has done to exacerbate health disparities and perpetuate health inequities,” says School of Public Health alum Dana Rice (SPH’10).

As an assistant professor of the Public Health Leadership Program at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, Rice centers her research and teaching on understanding the relationship between mass criminalization, mass incarceration, and public health.

“My work has focused not only on understanding this relationship, but on thinking about the ways that public health practitioners can use their tools to imagine a system that focuses on creating healthy and safe communities, instead of focusing on punishment,” she says.

A 2010 graduate (and part of the first cohort) of SPH’s former DrPH program in Social and Behavioral Sciences, Rice has worked in multiple sectors to advance health equity and social justice through public health leadership and community engagement. For more than 15 years, she worked in the Jail Health Division of the Department of Health and Human Services in Wayne County, Mich., first as the manager of infection control, and then director of health promotion and disease prevention. She also developed community-based initiatives at Vertex Pharmaceuticals to increase education and screening for hepatitis C, and then served as an adjunct assistant professor and senior lecturer at Wayne State School of Medicine before joining the faculty at UNC in 2017.

A self-described “pracademic,” Rice focuses on research that can facilitate meaningful change within the community. She is currently working on an initiative with five county health departments and sheriff’s departments that aims to divert people living with mental illness and substance abuse from the criminal legal system.

Rice is also collaborating with scholars, as well as national and local nonprofits, to develop COVID mitigation strategies for jails and prisons across the country. The coronavirus infection rate among people who are incarcerated is as much as five times higher than the general public due to overcrowding and an inability to social distance—and the absence of operational policies and practices that can mitigate these conditions.

“COVID has brought to light what is happening behind bars, but there is a lot of work left to be done to protect the health of vulnerable populations,” says Rice. In cities that have started to implement decarceration efforts, “we’re seeing that there is no relative increase in crime or decrease in safety, which shows that we can actually implement long-term strategies to imagine a new system,” she says. “There’s a real opportunity to have conversations about what it looks like to offer justice to someone who has been wronged, and implement strategies to prevent the harm in the first place.”

In the classroom, Rice teaches Mass Incarceration & Public Health; The Public Health Impact of Criminalizing the Marginalized; and the Integrated Learning Experience requirement in the school’s MPH program.

“Few people are trained in understanding a system that touches more than seven million people in this country,” she says, emphasizing that this system presents challenges that require nuanced thinking beyond dichotomous solutions. “We have to develop policies that are rooted in equity and social justice principles and that do not perpetuate the binary conversation that if certain communities are made whole and their rights are protected it means fewer rights for others. We have to say that equity is in the best interest of the population, and with that, we all win.”

Rice says she has kept in touch with SPH colleagues, faculty, and staff over the past 10 years.

“I don’t know where I’d be without my doctorate,” says Rice. “The DrPH program was an excellent opportunity to learn how to apply public health skills in a variety of settings, and establish a wonderful network of peers that I can call on to this day.”