End-of-Life Care and Prisons in the Era of U.S. Mass Incarceration

• In Event: 20859 - Prisons and the Production of Lives and Deaths

Abstract

U.S. prisons are increasingly sites of end-of-life care as the prison population rapidly ages. The policies of the tough-on-crime era produced a globally and historically unprecedented number of people sentenced to die in U.S. prisons. The U.S. prison has been a site of social and literal death, particularly for poor and racialized individuals, since its origins; however, the nature and scale of this death are distinct in the era of mass incarceration. In this paper, I ask: what logics and practices are used by prison administrators and public officials to provide end-of-life care for incarcerated people? Through discourse analysis of a case study in the state of Connecticut, I analyze how state actors are responding to the increasing need for end-of-life care for incarcerated people. Drawing from sociology of punishment, sociolegal studies, and necropolitics, I argue that prison nursing homes are an expanding site of literal and social death that actively disappears populations deemed burdensome. Finally, I demonstrate that end-of-life care in prison is a site of state-sanctioned death that is rapidly expanding in the wake of mass incarceration.

Author

• Hannah Schwendeman, University of Minnesota