The study of the health impacts of incarceration has generated new ethical imperatives focused on mitigating the suffering of incarcerated people. The problem with this framing, however, is that it presumes a binary relationship between care and suffering, which does not align with the legal status of the prisoner who suffers through the right to be cared for. Drawing from a prison health care class-action lawsuit in the state of Arizona, this essay explores the ethical insights, critiques, and impasses posed by the prisoner's health care claim. Through an analysis of the prisoner's plea for care, this essay ultimately advances an ethics of unhingement, which unsettles the assumed opposition between suffering and care and self and other. An ethics of unhingement not only refuses the present arrangement of structural violence and suffering under the carceral state, but poses the question, how do we care about the ways in which we suffer together?
Justin D. Strong (Thu,) studied this question.