New Books In Medicine

In 1976, the landmark supreme court case Estelle v. Gamble, established that under the Eighth Amendment “deliberate indifference” to the health needs of incarcerated individuals was tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment. Now, jails and prisons are one of the rare places in the contemporary U.S. where healthcare is deemed a right and not a privilege. In her new ethnography Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women behind Bars (University of California Press, 2017), physician and Anthropologist, Carolyn Sufrin, examines what this means for incarcerated women when health care, coercion and violence coalesce. In addition to describing in detail how women experience healthcare and motherhood in custody, she offers us devastating diagnoses of how broken our current health and social safety nets are that women come to desire the cruel relative safety of jail. My conversation with Dr. Sufrin just begins to tackle the rich, beautiful and devastatingly complex lives of the women she encountered and ca