Overview

How care and criminalization became entangled—and why abolition medicine mattersMedicine likes to tell an altruistic story. Maisam Alomar shows how that story masks an enduring partnership with racism and punishment. Beginning with the postwar “rehabilitative turn,” this incisive book tracks the carceral logics—assumptions about normalcy, deviance, and the bodies deemed fixable or discardable—that migrated beyond the prison into clinics, labs, and public health programs. Across four flashpoints—the Tuskegee Syphilis Study; Nixon’s sickle cell politics and the racial scripting of “deviance” during the War on Drugs; the consequences of psychiatric deinstitutionalization for care work and incarceration; and today’s entwining of emergency medicine and policing through projects such as Atlanta’s proposed Cop City—Alomar reveals how health institutions in the United States have enforced racial hierarchies while calling it care. The result is not an aberration but a system: surveillance masquerading as screening, eugenic counseling in the name of equity, pain criminalized as “drug seeking,” and hospital-police infrastructures that expand each other’s reach. This bracing, necessary intellectual intervention exposes how rehabilitation became a rationale for containment. Drawing on disability studies, ethnic and gender studies, and abolitionist praxis, Alomar advances the emerging framework of abolition medicine—not as a slogan, but as a rigorous rethinking of what health requires once state violence is named as a health determinant. Bold, lucid, and grounded in history, Carceral Care is an urgent contribution for scholars and organizers seeking to move beyond “disparities” toward a medicine that refuses carcerality at its root.

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Maisam Alomar is assistant professor of women and gender studies at University of Colorado, Boulder.

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