Wards of the State

In 1976, the Supreme Court affirmed incarcerated people’s right to health care under the Eighth Amendment. Wards of the State examines the everyday instantiation of this right in a maximum-security men’s prison in Pennsylvania. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Nicholas Iacobelli examines how the prison’s medical unit operates as a “ward of the state“—a site where the state’s ideologies are reproduced when its obligation to care collides with its role to punish.

Incarcerated men are also wards of the state in the sense of being cast as its biological and financial property. This dynamic creates a complex system of dependence, refusal, and skepticism, as well as troubling ideas of what constitutes health and illness in prison. Despite this, the right to health care opens spaces for men to envision futures and to make both personal and structural appeals to justice—with both tragic and hopeful consequences.  

Author Biography

Nicholas Iacobelli is Assistant Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Washington, where he cares for hospitalized patients and conducts anthropological research on the intersection of carcerality and health.