In Conversation: All This Safety is Killing Us

Join us for a conversation between Aminah Elster, Jennifer James, and Carlos Martinez on the intersection of prison abolition and healthcare. In 2025 Martinez co-edited All This Safety Is Killing Us: Health Justice Beyond Prisons, Police, and Borders to which Elster and James contributed the chapter “Medical Neglect as Carceral Violence.”

Aminah Elster is a Black feminist abolitionist, advocate, and researcher whose work transforms systems by centering the leadership and expertise of directly impacted people. She is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Unapologetically HERS (UAHERS), an organization led by formerly incarcerated women advancing healing, justice, and leadership through participatory research and professional development. Under her leadership, UAHERS launched the Participatory Action Research Leadership Program (PARLP)—a fellowship equipping people incarcerated in California women’s prisons with the tools to conduct research that informs advocacy, policy, and systems change.

Aminah’s abolitionist practice is also reflected in her long-standing work with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), where she serves as the Leadership & Resentencing Coordinator and has contributed to policy advocacy, participatory research, and the organization’s inside/outside organizing of those incarcerated in CA women’s prisons. Her work with CCWP has shaped campaigns advancing resentencing, challenging gender-based state violence, and uplifting peer-led leadership inside and outside prison walls.

She is also the CEO and principal of Proximate Strategies Consulting (PSC), a community-centered strategy and research firm that partners with public systems, foundations, and organizations to co-design equitable solutions and build cultures of belonging. PSC’s Fellowship portfolio increases the reach of peer-led interventions and helps systems access the expertise of people most affected by their policies—advancing this work through participatory action research, professional development, and applied research.

A certified paralegal and ICF Certified Professional Coach, Aminah is a contributing author to All This Safety Is Killing Us, where her chapter, “Medical Neglect as Carceral Violence,” exposes the violent realities of healthcare behind bars. She also co-authored the policy brief Criminal Record Stigma in the College-Educated Labor Market, which examines how record-based discrimination constrains opportunity even among credentialed job seekers. Aminah received her undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley.

Jennifer James is an Associate Professor and the Nursing Alumni and Mary Harms Endowed Chair in the Institute for Health and Aging and the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco, where she also directs the sociology PhD program. Jen is a sociologist and Black Feminist scholar who conducts community-engaged qualitative research on racism and health.

Her current work is focused on patient-provider relationships and shared decision-making in carceral settings. Across several research projects, her work centers the voices and experiences of people incarcerated in prisons and jails to better understand women’s health and aging behind bars. Her work has been published in social science, bioethics, and health sciences journals, as well as in numerous edited volumes and in publications distributed inside prisons. Dr. James holds a PhD in Sociology from UCSF, a Master’s of Social Work and a Master’s of Science in Social Policy from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Yale University.

Carlos Martinez, MPH, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies and core faculty member of the Global and Community Health program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Trained in public health and medical anthropology, Dr. Martinez’s research examines the health and sociocultural implications of policing, incarceration, and punitive immigration and drug policies. He is the co-editor of All This Safety Is Killing Us: Health Justice Beyond Prisons, Police, and Borders (North Atlantic Books, 2025).

This event is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Everything is Going Right and as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons.

Free