Cultivating Ambiguity
Keyword(s):
This chapter looks at how jail health workers are constantly confronted with the incoherence of the ostensibly coherent domains of carcerality and biomedical care. Such attention to ambiguity in clinic workers' actions and relationships was the essence of jailcare—a kind of care that grapples with inequality writ large. The ambiguity of jailcare asks fundamental questions about the moral worthiness of prisoners receiving care—people who, on the one hand, have ostensibly violated legal-social norms and may be seen as less deserving of services; and who, on the other hand, are marginalized by poverty, addiction, and racism, and deserve care because of their structural vulnerability.