User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America

 Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America is a nonfiction book by Wesleyan University associate professor, Anthony Ryan Hatch, in the Science in Society program. that was published in 2019 by the University of Minnesota Press.

Summary
Hatch investigates the use of powerful psychotropic—mind-altering substances on large-scale human populations who are part of the American "carceral state", including people in jails and prisons, "foster homes, immigrant detention centres, nursing homes and the military." Hatch called the public policy in the 1990s, that led United States to give "large quantities" of drugs to "captive Americans" who are residents in state-managed institutions "the most unscientific natural experiment in the history of biomedicine."

The United States carceral state policy called Technocorrections, refers to "strategically applying new technologies in the effort to reduce the costs of mass incarceration and minimise the risks that prisoners pose to society". This includes the use "psychotropic drugs, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, tranquilisers and sedatives.

Reviews
A review in Inside Higher Ed said the biopolitical issues that Hatch discusses in Silent Cells are in "many ways more disturbing" than the citizenship question proposed for the 2020 United States Census in its "effort to surveil and police the populace".

A review in the LSE Review of Books, explores the use of psychotropic drugs as part of the US carceral state, focusing not only on jails and prisons, but also foster homes, immigrant detention centres, nursing homes and the military. This is a taut and nimble study, writes Alessandro Ford, that allows the silence around this issue to speak volumes.

Harriet A. Washington, the author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present called the book a "powerful indictment of imposing psychotropics" in state-managed institutions. Washington said that Hatch combined "novel insights" that were "supported by rigorous scholarship with fresh, accessible writing," and that he built an "unimpugnable case that unveils a deeply troubling pattern and also affords us the chance to end it."

Lisa Guenther, the author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, called it a "ground-breaking study of psychiatric violence in U.S. prisons." Guenther said that without this "normalized practice of prison management" "mass incarceration would be impossible to sustain." OCLC tags Corrections, United States, Mental illness Treatment, Moral and ethical aspects, Mentally ill prisoners, Prisoners, Health and hygiene, Psychotropic drugs.