Project description
Health reports in liberal and soviet prisons
The concealment of prisoners’ poor health by penal authorities, often for political or bureaucratic reasons, remains an understudied phenomenon across different historical periods and geopolitical contexts. The ERC-funded DeathAndManipulation project will examine how prison and camp authorities in Britain, India, Soviet Russia, and the US have manipulated health statistics from the late modern era to the present. By analysing techniques used to obscure prisoner mortality, the project will uncover patterns of bureaucratic control. It will investigate cases of medical malpractice and systemic neglect, providing a history of how custodial institutions have downplayed sickness and epidemics. This research intends to offer new insights into incarceration, health, and state power.
Objective
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This project’s overarching theme is how penal authorities conceal the prisoners’ poor health with malicious intent for various reasons and by various techniques, statistical and rhetorical. From this angle, the project examines British metropolitan, Indian colonial, American, and Soviet-Russian prisons and camps from the late modern era – the birth of the Western penitentiary - to the present moment. Within this ambitious temporal and spatial frame, the project poses ""big questions"" about the universal operational patterns of modern penality and bureaucracy, as observed via managing prisoners’ health and epidemics. The project seeks to understand why and when prisoner health statistics became significant enough to be manipulated for political purposes. Conceptually, the project engages with the contentious issue of deliberate extermination of prisoners concealed by medical malfeasance. The outcome will be the first comparative, integrated history of bureaucratic malpractices to occasionally downplay the accurate scale of sickness, epidemics, and mortality in custodial institutions of Western liberal and authoritarian regimes. The interdisciplinary research effort, while historical, combines insights from medical statistics, penology, criminology, penal sociology, and bioethics.
The ambition behind the project’s goals is to revise the traditional way literature classifies penal systems globally. This revision is achieved by shifting attention to health and its reporting as a defining feature that separates various carceral regimes from each other. The project will generate a new typology of penal systems based on the criterion of health reporting and its veracity. Beyond the strictly academic contribution to the debates on penality, modernity, technocratic social engineering, legacies of colonial violence, and total institutions, the project has implications for international prison reform and palliative care ethics.
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Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology demography mortality
- humanities philosophy, ethics and religion ethics ethical principles
- social sciences political sciences public administration bureaucracy
- social sciences law criminology
- social sciences law penology
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
00014 Helsinki
Finland
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.