The prison as/and laboratory

This chapter focuses on carceral relationships across the Prison Industrial Complex and the Medical Industrial Complex, particularly as they intersect within &s;Big Pharma&s;. While experimentation on prisoners occurred over most of the 20th century and continues into the 21st, it is worth recognizing the parallel structure of exploitation and killing of millions of nonhuman animals in laboratory research and experimentation in the US each year. The chapter also focuses on relationships across &s;animality&s; and &s;humanness&s; which themselves create the conditions within which certain human and nonhuman bodies can be made exploitable and disposable. It touches on the legal frameworks that allow humans and animals to be used as experimental material for profit. J. Sexton, F. Wilderson, and Colin Dayan posit that the ontological status of "Blackness" itself originated through Middle Passage chattel slavery, and out of this process, a foundational link formed between the African-American Black body and animality.

Criminology · Prison · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Psychology