Andrea Pitts – Carceral Medicine and Prison Abolition: Trust and Truth-telling in Correctional Healthcare

Andrea  Pitts, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, gives a lecture entitled:

“Carceral Medicine and Prison Abolition: Trust and Truth-telling in Correctional Healthcare”

The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that the privation of healthcare for incarcerated persons would constitute a violation of the Eighth Amendment. While that ruling, in effect, mandated a standard of care for incarcerated persons, the institutional means through which healthcare is provided in federal, state, and private detention facilities have been neither uniform nor without their share of problems. A number of human rights organizations and prisoner advocacy groups have documented patterns of neglect and malpractice within the nation’s prisons, jails, and detention facilities, including basic sanitary concerns, undertreatment for severe illnesses and injuries, and the structural incapacity of many correctional healthcare systems to meet the needs of their aging patients. Alongside the literature outlining concerns in correctional healthcare, a distinct and theoretically dense body of evidence on the structural patterns of racism operating through carceral systems in the U.S. has also demanded scholarly and political attention. Much of this work marks the continuities that mass incarceration in the U.S. has with historical patterns of disenfranchisement, exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence inflicted on communities of color, and especially Black Americans. Within this discourse, arguments for penal abolition have become prominent alongside critiques of structural racism. In this vein, a number of scholars and activists have been calling for the comprehensive dismantling of penal institutions, legislative measures, and associated corporations that have built the very carceral networks that perpetually inflict harm on communities of color both in the U.S. and abroad. In dialogue with contemporary research on correctional healthcare and literature on institutional racism in the context of clinical and colonial medicine, this presentation analyzes trust and truth-telling among patients and providers in correctional settings with the aim of developing an argument for the abolition of systems of incarceration. While the improvement of systems of healthcare has been defended as an important goal within the field of correctional medicine, structural epistemic injustices operating through race, gender, and disability within correctional medicine point toward a broader argument for the dismantling of carceral systems of punishment more generally.

Bio:

Andrea J. Pitts is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Their research interests include philosophy of race and gender, social epistemology, Latin American and U.S. Latina/o philosophy, and philosophy of medicine. Their publications appear in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Radical Philosophy Review, and Inter-American Journal of Philosophy. Dr. Pitts is also currently co-editing two forthcoming volumes: one on the reception of the work of Henri Bergson in decolonial thought, feminism, and critical race studies, and a volume on contemporary scholarship in U.S. Latina and Latin American feminist philosophy.