Summoning the Sick and Violent to Jail

This chapter presents ethnographic evidence to understand how medicine relates to the daily problems of filling up a large urban jail. The major problem of jailing is that there are far too many sick incarcerated persons and persons with serious criminal biographies than there are available specialized cells. The chapter shows that in order to resolve these problems, jailers reinterpret inmates’ biographies through stigma about the potential abuse of medical services and the widespread use of pharmaceuticals to quell disturbances. It is this work that jailers do, producing sick inmates, rather than the biographies that inmates bring with them, which ensures that the limited space of the jail can always accommodate the demand for space. In total, the expansion of medicine in jails is neither about serving inmates’ needs nor ignoring them, but instead is about using medicalization to resolve the fundamental problems of the overcrowded jail.