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 obligati...