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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (2 results)

  • Thesis
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2022)

In this dissertation, I critically interrogate the nexus between punishment and healthcare. The provision of care is a significant capacity of punishment as it is situated across the founding ideals of the prison, the build-up of mass incarceration, and current political discourse surrounding criminal justice reform and public health. As taken up in the context of Arizona in the early 21st century, this project positions penal care as a means to stage broader debates and interventions in socio-legal studies, critical prison studies, and theories of subjectivity. By approaching a prisoner healthcare class-action lawsuit as a type of archive, this dissertation engages political, aesthetic, and ethical critiques of punishment, suffering, and care. Through an archival analysis of the prisoner rights lawsuit, I read its legal texts and artifacts as a dynamic discourse of institutional catastrophe, biological and psychological suffering, and failed legal reforms. First, I show how the privatization of Arizona’s prison health care system not only reflected broader processes of social abandonment, but reveals the mechanisms and machinations that position the prisoner’s health and life as resources to extract and exhaust. Second, I demonstrate how the prisoner’s healthcare claim is in excess to visual depictions and interpretive frameworks of suffering, human rights, and civil death. The repetition of the prisoner’s plea intrudes upon the very terms of mastery implied by the image and the subject. Lastly, I explore various discourses that bring together notions of care and punishment to think about their structural relationship and what it might mean to respond ethically to the prisoner’s demand. Here, I formulate an ethics that is staked on our constitutive failure to prevent suffering and how this might implicate our refusal of penal care regimes.

    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC San Francisco Previously Published Works (2022)
    Incarceration, along with its most restrictive iteration, solitary confinement, is an increasingly common experience in America. More than two million Americans are currently incarcerated, and at least one-fifth of incarcerated people will experience solitary confinement. Understanding the barriers to care people experience in prison, and especially in solitary confinement, is key to improving their access to care during and after incarceration. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with a random sample of 106 people living in solitary confinement and a convenience sample of 77 people working in solitary confinement in Washington State, we identify two key barriers to care that people in solitary confinement face: cultural barriers (assumptions that incarcerated people do not need or do not deserve care) and structural barriers (physical spaces and policies that make contacting a healthcare provider difficult). While scholarship has documented both the negative health consequences of solitary confinement and correctional healthcare providers' challenges navigating between the "dual loyalty" of patient care and security missions, especially within solitary confinement, few have documented the specific mechanisms by which people in solitary confinement are repeatedly triaged out of healthcare access. Understanding these barriers to care is critical not only to improving correctional healthcare delivery but also to improving healthcare access for millions of formerly incarcerated people who have likely had negative experiences seeking healthcare in prison, especially if they were in solitary confinement.
      Cover page: Triaged Out of Care: How Carceral Logics Complicate a ‘Course of Care’ in Solitary Confinement
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