Announcing the 2026 Stubing Lecture — Confinement and Care: The Ethics of Health Care Behind Bars

Health care in carceral settings raises important ethical questions around access to care, patient autonomy and consent, clinician loyalty and conflicts of interest, public health responsibilities, and the gap between community and correctional health, among others.

On November 16, 2026, The Greenwall Foundation will host this year’s William C. Stubing Memorial Lecture, Confinement and Care: The Ethics of Health Care Behind Bars, in person in New York City and online. Homer Venters, MD, former Chief Medical Officer for the New York City jail system, will discuss the ethical dimensions of health care in carceral settings, including jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers. Dr. Venters currently serves as a court-appointed monitor of correctional health and is the author of Life and Death in Rikers Island (2019). He will be joined in conversation by Keri Blakinger, an investigative reporter at ProPublica covering federal prisons and the death penalty.

The event will begin with a reception at 5:30 p.m. EST, followed by the moderated conversation beginning at 6:30 p.m. EST. An audience question-and-answer session will follow.

How to Register

Register to attend the event in person here.

Register for the livestream here.

Registration is free and open to all, but in-person seating is limited.

About the William C. Stubing Memorial Lecture 

William C. Stubing served as President of The Greenwall Foundation for 21 years. In 2016, the Foundation established the William C. Stubing Memorial Lecture in honor of its beloved former President, who guided the Foundation to its current focus on bioethics. Previous Lectures have covered timely topics in bioethics: trust in science, medicine, and public health; the opioid crisis; climate change and mental health; automation and inequity in health care; the public health and ethical challenges of COVID-19; the social inequities revealed by the pandemic; physician aid-in-dying; drug pricing; and genome editing.