NCJ Number
129841
Date Published
1990
Length
212 pages
Annotation
This book analyzes the origins, development, and consolidation of medical power through the Prison Medical Service in England and Wales from 1774 through 1989.
Abstract
The analysis challenges the traditional view that medical care for prisoners has been a journey from barbarism to enlightenment. It argues that prison medical workers, rather than operating from a nonideological and nonpolitical perspective, have been deeply involved in reinforcing the discipline of penality. As the book indicates, the will to discipline has had a significant impact on the level of medical care that inmates have received since the end of the 18th century, producing deleterious and sometimes fatal consequences for some inmates. The analysis also examines medicine's role in maintaining order in prisons. This has operated at two levels. First, it examines the relationship between prison medical workers and the physical and chemical programs of control that have been used in the last 200 years. Second, it analyzes how medicine has worked at an ideological level through reinforcing individualistic explanations of deviance that dominate State policies, particularly toward those regarded as disorderly and recalcitrant. The discussion also reveals the patterns of resistance developed by inmates and the strategies they have adopted to deny medicine a position of hegemonic domination within prisons. Chapter notes, references, and a subject index