Teaching Abolition Medicine: Best Practices for Centering Criminalized Communities in Medical Education

Mass incarceration is a significant structural determinant of health, affecting incarcerated individuals, their families, and communities, with profound racial disparities. Health care professionals have an opportunity to reduce these inequities through abolition medicine. Abolition in health care means rewriting how doctors relate to patients labeled as criminal and is not a new checklist that can be imposed on the existing curriculum. Beyond changing individual clinical practice, abolition medicine also provides a critical framework for dismantling unjust policies. However, published medical education curricula lack an in-depth component on how to identify and disrupt medical practices designed to perpetuate inequities, and few report development alongside individuals with lived experience. In this article we explore the current state of medical education curricula as they pertain to health, incarceration, and abolition. We propose best practices for reducing health inequities for criminalized individuals grounded in our work alongside individuals with lived experience of incarceration.