An eye-opening look at how incarcerated people, health
professionals, and others behind and beyond bars came together to
problem-solve incarceration. Raising the Living Dead is a history
of Puerto Rico's carceral rehabilitation system that brings to life
the interactions of incarcerated people, their wider social
networks, and health care professionals. Alberto Ortiz Diaz
describes the ways that multiple communities of care came together
both inside and outside of prisons to imagine and enact
solution-oriented cultures of rehabilitation from the 1930s to the
1960s. Scientific and humanistic approaches to well-being were
deliberately fused to raise the "living dead," an expression that
reemerged in the modern Caribbean to refer to prisoners. These
reform groups sought to raise incarcerated people physically,
mentally, socially, spiritually, and civically. The book is based
on deep, original archival research into the Oso Blanco (White
Bear) penitentiary in Puerto Rico, yet it situates its study within
Puerto Rico's broader carceral archipelago and other Caribbean
prisons. The agents of this history include not only physical
health professionals, but also psychologists and psychiatrists,
social workers, spiritual and religious practitioners, and, of
course, the prisoners and their families. By following all these
groups and emphasizing the interpersonal exercise of power, Ortiz
Diaz tells a story that goes beyond debates about structural and
social control. The book addresses key issues in the history of
prisons and the histories of medicine and belief, including how
prisoners' different racial, class, and cultural identities shaped
their incarceration and how professionals living in a colonial
society dealt with the challenge of rehabilitating prisoners for
citizenship. Raising the Living Dead is not just about convicts,
their immediate interlocutors, and their contexts, however, but
about how together these open a window into the history of social
uplift projects within the (neo)colonial societies of the
Caribbean. There is no book like this in Caribbean historiography;
few examine these themes in the larger literature on the history of
prisons.
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