Wards of the State

Care and Custody in a Maximum-Security Prison

In 1976, the Supreme Court affirmed incarcerated people's right to healthcare under the Eighth Amendment. Wards of the State examines the everyday instantiation of incarcerated people's right to healthcare within a men's maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Nicholas Iacobelli observes how the prison's medical unit operates as a "ward of the state"—a space that reproduces the state's ideological commitment to punishment through its obligation to provide care. Incarcerated men are also cast as wards of the state, becoming its biological and financial property. These dynamics result in complex systems of dependence, refusal, and skepticism—and troubling ideas of what constitutes health and illness in prison. Despite this, the right to care also opens spaces for men to envision futures and make both personal and structural appeals to justice.

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