A trio of second-year Yale School of Public Health students – Ryan Orr (Health Policy), Ingeborg Hyde (Health Care Management), and Olivia Canie (Health Policy) – took first prize in their category, U.S. Prison Reform, in the Yale Policy Institute’s Hackathon competition, held virtually April 7-9. The winning team prevailed over more than 100 other competitors from around the world.
YPI, a student-run undergraduate think tank, holds the Hackathon, according to its website, “to empower students interested in solving the pressing issues around them by providing them with the tools, resources, and opportunities necessary to explore an interest in global issues,” This year’s event focused on two topics: prison reform and the responsible use of artificial intelligence in the military.
“We were super excited and felt extremely humbled,” Hyde said. “We felt confident going into the final presentation, as we felt very well-prepared by the various policy and analysis classes, as well as social determinants of health classes, that we’ve collectively taken at YSPH and elsewhere at Yale.”
We were very excited to apply our knowledge and expertise in this space. Between limited resources and immense pressure to reform, American prisons are facing a lot of new challenges without the ability to solve them.
Ryan Orr, MPH '23 (Health Policy)
The competition was time-intensive, “and that’s the fun of it!” Hyde said. YPI released the case prompt at 10 a.m. on Friday, April 7, and teams had until 10 a.m. the next day to submit a written policy memo outlining their approach. The trio was notified at 5 p.m. Saturday, April 8, that they had advanced to the final, and then had until 8 a.m. Sunday to complete a presentation slide deck. The YSPH team’s presentation was entitled “Reducing Recidivism as Means to Improving Prison Population Health and Wellness.”
“We were very excited to apply our knowledge and expertise in this space,” Orr said. “Between limited resources and immense pressure to reform, American prisons are facing a lot of new challenges without the ability to solve them. Central to our solution proposal was establishing a partnership between corrections personnel and public health practitioners to inject more resources into solving systemic problems plaguing our corrections institutions and to comprehensively approach the issue of recidivism and decarceration.”
“After researching more about the American prison system, we identified overcrowding as a major upstream issue to a lot of the other issues rampant within the system, such as substandard health care, poor facility quality, and safety concerns,” Canie added. “We also found that high recidivism, which is the likelihood to re-offend after release, is a key factor in overcrowding. We, therefore, created a policy solution to address recidivism, which is fueled by the lack of social supports when transitioning to non-incarcerated life.”
The team’s policy solution was twofold. One part called for the creation of a digital platform that would centralize resources for decarcerated people and help them find housing, health care, and employment; “These resources exist, but they’re very spread out and difficult to find, with not a lot of consistent support from the prison system to facilitate access,” Canie said.
The other component of their approach, Hyde said, was to transfer oversight of social support services and health care within prison systems from departments of corrections to departments of public health. “We feel public health departments are a more natural fit to regulate prison health care,” she explained, “given that they regulate most other health facilities and have strong training in considering social determinants of health and promoting health equity.”
Coincidently, this part of the team’s approach is currently being discussed by lawmakers in Connecticut.
“Part of our presentation that demonstrated the feasibility of our policy solution hinged on a bill that’s been raised in the Connecticut General Assembly, which aims to transfer oversight of prison health care within the state to the Connecticut Department of Public Health,” Canie said. “We thought that this showed that this policy is possible, so we’ll see what happens as this bill progresses.”