|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
A critical investigation into the use of psychotropic drugs to
pacify and control inmates and other captives in the vast U.S.
prison, military, and welfare systems For at least four decades,
U.S. prisons and jails have aggressively turned to psychotropic
drugs-antidepressants, antipsychotics, sedatives, and
tranquilizers-to silence inmates, whether or not they have been
diagnosed with mental illnesses. In Silent Cells, Anthony Ryan
Hatch demonstrates that the pervasive use of psychotropic drugs has
not only defined and enabled mass incarceration but has also become
central to other forms of captivity, including foster homes,
military and immigrant detention centers, and nursing homes. Silent
Cells shows how, in shockingly large numbers, federal, state, and
local governments and government-authorized private agencies pacify
people with drugs, uncovering patterns of institutional violence
that threaten basic human and civil rights. Drawing on publicly
available records, Hatch unearths the coercive ways that
psychotropics serve to manufacture compliance and docility,
practices hidden behind layers of state secrecy, medical
complicity, and corporate profiteering. Psychotropics, Hatch shows,
are integral to "technocorrectional" policies devised to minimize
public costs and increase the private profitability of mass
captivity while guaranteeing public safety and national security.
This broad indictment of psychotropics is therefore animated by a
radical counterfactual question: would incarceration on the scale
practiced in the United States even be possible without
psychotropics?
A critical investigation into the use of psychotropic drugs to
pacify and control inmates and other captives in the vast U.S.
prison, military, and welfare systems For at least four decades,
U.S. prisons and jails have aggressively turned to psychotropic
drugs-antidepressants, antipsychotics, sedatives, and
tranquilizers-to silence inmates, whether or not they have been
diagnosed with mental illnesses. In Silent Cells, Anthony Ryan
Hatch demonstrates that the pervasive use of psychotropic drugs has
not only defined and enabled mass incarceration but has also become
central to other forms of captivity, including foster homes,
military and immigrant detention centers, and nursing homes. Silent
Cells shows how, in shockingly large numbers, federal, state, and
local governments and government-authorized private agencies pacify
people with drugs, uncovering patterns of institutional violence
that threaten basic human and civil rights. Drawing on publicly
available records, Hatch unearths the coercive ways that
psychotropics serve to manufacture compliance and docility,
practices hidden behind layers of state secrecy, medical
complicity, and corporate profiteering. Psychotropics, Hatch shows,
are integral to "technocorrectional" policies devised to minimize
public costs and increase the private profitability of mass
captivity while guaranteeing public safety and national security.
This broad indictment of psychotropics is therefore animated by a
radical counterfactual question: would incarceration on the scale
practiced in the United States even be possible without
psychotropics?
Why do African Americans have exceptionally high rates of
hypertension, diabetes, and obesity? Is it their genes? Their
disease-prone culture? Their poor diets? Such racist explanations
for racial inequalities in metabolic health have circulated in
medical journals for decades. Blood Sugar analyzes and challenges
the ways in which “metabolic syndrome” has become a major
biomedical category that medical researchers have created to better
understand the risks high blood pressure, blood sugar, body fat,
and cholesterol pose to people. An estimated sixty million
Americans are well on the way to being diagnosed with it, many of
them belonging to people of color. Anthony Ryan Hatch argues that
the syndrome represents another, very real crisis and that its
advent signals a new form of “colorblind scientific racism”—a
repackaging of race within biomedical and genomic research.
Examining the cultural discussions and scientific practices that
target human metabolism of prescription drugs and sugar by African
Americans, he reveals how medical researchers who use metabolic
syndrome to address racial inequalities in health have in effect
reconstructed race as a fixed, biological, genetic feature of
bodies—without incorporating social and economic inequalities
into the equation. And just as the causes of metabolic syndrome are
framed in racial terms, so are potential drug treatments and
nutritional health interventions. The first sustained social and
political inquiry of metabolic syndrome, this provocative and
timely book is a crucial contribution to the emerging literature on
race and medicine. It will engage those who seek to understand how
unjust power relations shape population health inequalities and the
production of medical knowledge and biotechnologies.
Why do African Americans have exceptionally high rates of
hypertension, diabetes, and obesity? Is it their genes? Their
disease-prone culture? Their poor diets? Such racist explanations
for racial inequalities in metabolic health have circulated in
medical journals for decades. Blood Sugar analyzes and challenges
the ways in which “metabolic syndrome” has become a major
biomedical category that medical researchers have created to better
understand the risks high blood pressure, blood sugar, body fat,
and cholesterol pose to people. An estimated sixty million
Americans are well on the way to being diagnosed with it, many of
them belonging to people of color. Anthony Ryan Hatch argues that
the syndrome represents another, very real crisis and that its
advent signals a new form of “colorblind scientific racism”—a
repackaging of race within biomedical and genomic research.
Examining the cultural discussions and scientific practices that
target human metabolism of prescription drugs and sugar by African
Americans, he reveals how medical researchers who use metabolic
syndrome to address racial inequalities in health have in effect
reconstructed race as a fixed, biological, genetic feature of
bodies—without incorporating social and economic inequalities
into the equation. And just as the causes of metabolic syndrome are
framed in racial terms, so are potential drug treatments and
nutritional health interventions. The first sustained social and
political inquiry of metabolic syndrome, this provocative and
timely book is a crucial contribution to the emerging literature on
race and medicine. It will engage those who seek to understand how
unjust power relations shape population health inequalities and the
production of medical knowledge and biotechnologies.
|
|