Medicine and the Criminal Justice System

Catalog description

This course interrogates the connections, collaborations and conflicts between medicine and the criminal justice system throughout the 20th and 21st century United States. We will look at the historical feedback loops between these two institutions, giving attention to how medical experts have become involved in, suggested reforms and bolstered punitive and carceral practices as well as instances when incarcerated people, bodies and minds were used and abused for medical research. We will consider the role of medicine in different parts of the carceral system, including expert witnesses in courtrooms and access to medical care in jails and prisons, and look at moments in history when carceral institutions and spaces became clinical laboratories aiding in critical moments of medical “progress." The course gives special attention to the role of sex, gender, race and disability in these interactions, both intimate and institutional, and students will engage with frameworks from black studies, disability studies, queer studies, science studies as well as histories of psychiatry, medicine and technology.