Practicing penal harm medicine in the United States: Prisoners' voices from jail

Abstract

This article explores how the implementation of the penal harm movement within a correctional health care system can lead to the ill-treatment and torture of prisoners. Through an interpretive/inductive analysis of reports written by a federal court monitor and 103 letters written by prisoners to a federal court monitor overseeing a consent decree of a county mega jail located in the United States, we identify six areas of ill-treatment and torture at the jail's medical facilities: (1) using medical care to humiliate prisoners;(2) withholding medical care from HIV-positive prisoners and those with AIDS; (3) withholding medical care from other prisoners; (4) exposing prisoners to temperature extremes and sleep deprivation; (5) using dental care as a means of ill-treatment and torture; and (6) falsifying prisoners' medical records. Because correctional medical personnel work in a system that subordinates their professional canons to the efficiency-based rationality of the new penology and the ethical relativism of the penal harm movement, we conclude that some correctional health providers sympathetic to the custodial subculture abdicate their ethical obligations, and that the result is illtreatment and torture of prisoners.

Ill‐treatment and torture at Abu Ghraib prison: irrational policy implementation and administrative breakdown

“…Prisons without a chain of command operate with reduced supervision, little training, few official procedures, and a small number of formal policies (Arenson, 2006). In these units, the subculture of correctional officers becomes very important to what the correctional officers actually do on a day-to-day basis (Vaughn & Smith, 1999). At Abu Ghraib, powerful officers within the prison socialized all other officers into a belief system what valued violence aimed at prisoners.…”

Breaking Bodies Into Pieces: Time, Torture and Bio-Power

“…But more than seeing health care professionals working in prisons as adjuncts to a penal apparatus dedicated to reform, we view health care professionals as serving the function of a modern-day pastorate, guiding, pushing, and pacifying dangerous prisoners to ready themselves for death (Campbell v. Wood 1994). As an integral part of the prison and the execution of capital punishment throughout the 20th century, health care professionals provide stability, reliability, and the means to achieve the goals of a peaceful death (Vaughn and Smith 1999;Lifton 2000). One important objective in utilizing health care professionals in prison settings is the ''sanitization of penal practice and penal language'' (Garland 1990: 235) to effect the complete absence of resistance from the condemned.…”

Toward a New Methodology for Legal Research in Criminal Justice

“…Rigorous legal research combined with a social science approach can yield powerful scholarship (Vaughn and Smith 1999). The method should be used in judicial process studies that familiarize students with basic procedures for the handling of cases by various courts.…”