Death, Smoke, and Mirrors: Manipulation of Health Data in Liberal and Authoritarian Custodial Institutions

Descripción del proyecto

Informes sanitarios en prisiones liberales y soviéticas

La ocultación de la mala salud de los presos por parte de las autoridades penales, a menudo por motivos políticos o burocráticos, sigue siendo un fenómeno poco estudiado en distintos períodos históricos y contextos geopolíticos. El proyecto DeathAndManipulation, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, examinará cómo las autoridades de prisiones y campos de Gran Bretaña, India, la Rusia soviética y Estados Unidos han manipulado las estadísticas sanitarias desde finales de la era moderna hasta la actualidad. Mediante el análisis de las técnicas usadas para ocultar la mortalidad de los presos, el proyecto descubrirá pautas de control burocrático. Investigará casos de mala praxis médica y negligencia sistémica, proporcionando una historia de cómo las instituciones de custodia han restado importancia a las enfermedades y epidemias. La investigación pretende ofrecer nuevas perspectivas sobre el encarcelamiento, la salud y el poder del Estado.

Objetivo

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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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