ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how reformist policies around mental health care in prisons reproduces the logics of carcerality whereby the medicalization of mental distress is utilized as a means to expand the carceral state. This chapter traces past and contemporary histories that illustrate the relationship between institutionalized psychiatry and the pathologization of Black and Indigenous peoples and nonnormative gender and sexual expressions to justify their containment in order to maintain the White supremacist nation-state. Through analyzing newsletters written by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated peoples in women’s prisons and their experiences of mental distress alongside liberal reformist legal literature, a critical race, feminist, and disability analysis of psychological and psychiatric institutions is revealed to be germane to the overall project of penal abolition.
