Lethal Care: The Louisiana State Penitentiary Model of Medical Violence

Under the Eighth Amendment, prisons are legally mandated to provide constitutionally adequate standards of medical care to the incarcerated. But how do we make sense of a carceral structure in which the very delivery of medical care results in preventable death? This article offers a carceral case study of how prison medical care during the era of mass incarceration generates racialized mortality at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison. By analyzing caselaw documents drawn from the docket of Lewis v. Cain, an ongoing lawsuit alleging inadequate medical care at Angola, this article seeks to address the limits of pursuing relief from prison conditions through legal interventions and reforms that are always yet to arrive. Rather than examining prison medical care and preventable death as problems to be reformed, this project aims to develop theoretical insight into how Angola Prison enacts “medical violence” against its captive population. This refers to the use of prison healthcare capacities to harm rather than affirm the lives of the incarcerated. As this case study argues, medical violence operates through organized abandonment, disregard, and carceral extraction, which together extend the life of the prison through the deaths of its captive population.