Patient or Prisoner

Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center 

At a time when policing and medicine are colliding in the post-Dobbs landscape, the extent of hospital's participation in policing and punishment merits attention. This paper argues that hospitals in the "free world" have become part of the infrastructure of mass incarceration. They perform functions essential to the operations of mass incarceration by identifying criminals, helping build criminal cases, preparing people for incarceration, and treating and returning people to imprisonment. Carceral authorities alter the complex, structured, and regulated hospital workplace by their immense formal and informal powers. This paper identifies this deference to and incorporation of carceral rules and practices as an expansion of the modalities of policing and custodial practices, pointing in part to the ways that hospitals perpetuate problems of mass incarceration, such as racial subordination and loyalty to carceral logics of "public safety."