Life in Prison: Biopolitics, Ill-Being, and the Neoliberal Penitentiary

Abstract

In the US today, 2.3 million prisoners have a constitutional right to healthcare. At the same time, policies driven by neoliberalism and White supremacy have ballooned US prisons, incarcerating largely the working and workless urban poor. This dissertation investigates this juncture through a case study of prison healthcare in Washington state prisons – both its everyday practice and its administration. To do this, I employ policy analysis alongside interviews with state actors, prisoner advocates, and formerly incarcerated women and trans folks. I make three claims. First, I argue that the prisoner’s ostensible right to healthcare depends upon a particular form of what I term ‘carceral biocitizenship.’ Both prison policy and prison healthcare enable and result from a double ontological violence: first, the incarcerated person’s biological being is divorced from its political context or agency; second, the incarcerated person’s biological needs are devalued according to a penal hierarchy of human value. Second, I argue that nutritionist ideologies have been central in enabling the project of mass incarceration. Over the past two decades, Washington state has combined nutritionist ideology with neoliberal rationalities to slowly marketize its prison food system, producing a malnutritious prison food system harmful to prisoner health, well-being, political life, and dignity. Now, the state is finally reforming it prison food. Yet, bureaucrats have taken nutrition science as the only paradigm for ‘healthy’ food. As a science based in White, middle-class food habits, however, nutrition science privileges (cis)sexist, classist, and racist ideals of health. Reform efforts that seek to improve prison food within state-sponsored frameworks reinforce the carceral state and its biopolitical control. Third, I argue that prison creates a care deficit marked by carceral isolation, expropriation, and organized abandonment. To compensate for this crisis of care behind bars, the prison then coerces and expropriates incarcerated people’s unpaid care labor as stopgap. For their part, incarcerated women and trans folks respond to this care crisis through myriad practices of counter-conduct aimed at survival, autonomy, and the pursuit of a good life in a bad life. In my conclusion, I address the implications of this analysis for prison abolition.