ANTH, DOC, HRP, POLI, SOC, the Disability & Accessibility Studies Initiative, Disability Access Services Presents

The Psychopolitics of the Carceral State: Lessons from the Los Angeles Jail System

This talk examines the place of psychiatry in the ever shape-shifting U.S. carceral state. It presents an ethnographic account of the Los Angeles Jail system’s mental health facility, the largest in the United States. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research inside LA’s jails, I explore how and why jail mental health care appears to only sustain and further individual and collective suffering. Bringing together a conjunctural analysis of the LA jail mental health care crisis and the pre-figurative possibilities of psychiatric utopianism demonstrated by the organizing inside and outside the jail, I describe jail mental health care as a terrain of psycho-politics. On this terrain, particular relationships harden and become the glue holding the jail together and enabling its reproduction, while struggles are simultaneously waged at its points of contradiction. This multi-leveled approach demonstrates how the jail is an institutional and ideological regime wherein a particular form of psychiatry is brought in to manage its recursive crises. It also offers a lens through which to understand efforts to interrupt carceral social reproduction.

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102

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