The Social Life of Civil Death: Medical Violence and Anti-blackness in the Captive Prison

This dissertation examines how medical violence in prison operates as a life-extracting force necessary for the maintenance of anti-blackness as punishment. More specifically, it analyzes two prison sites—Louisiana and California—to illustrate how medical violence came to be normalized under mass incarceration. The Introductory chapter offers an overview of literature that situates mass incarceration at the intersection of medical violence and anti-blackness. Each subsequent chapter provides a closer analysis of how medical violence and anti-blackness are manifested through imprisonment. The second chapter is a theoretical exploration of how a debate on civil death, as a theory about punishment, and social death, as a theory about slavery, are mobilized within Socio-Legal Studies to explain solitary confinement. By analyzing solitary confinement as both a form of medical violence and civil death, the chapter explores the slippage between racial captivity and carceral confinement. The third chapter reconstructs a history of Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, from its antebellum origins as a slave planation, up to its reconfiguration as a state penitentiary during Reconstruction, to show how social death has always informed the prison’s logics of extraction. The chapter argues that anti-blackness and medical violence has been essential to the prison-plantation, as demonstrated by the example of the Angola 3 political prisoners, as well as the prison’s management of hospice care, death and dying, and burial practices. The fourth chapter argues that, in the state of California, medical violence in prison is administered through policy reform. The chapter examines how Eighth Amendment litigation on inadequate medical conditions inside California prisons culminated in the construction of the state’s first medical prison, California Health Care Facility. While this prison was designed to usher in an era of reform, it has instead, legitimized death in prison as a normative feature of the carceral state