The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation. Developing and maintaining clinically and ethically appropriate surgical care for incarcerees requires clinicians, health care organizations, and governments to actively resist historically entrenched patterns of devaluing incarcerees’ humanity and personhood. Neglect of carceral patients’ surgical care needs, in particular, remains systematized to the persistent detriment of incarcerees’ perioperative and surgical care, recovery, outcomes, and overall health. Carceral surgical patients’ risk/benefit profiles must be contextualized at every stage of their care by their diminished legal agency, restricted liberty, and increased environmental risk for a range of abuses and trauma. Carceral surgical patients’ vulnerabilities can be exacerbated by uncertainty or conflict about the scope and applicability of state authority relative to clinicians’ authority, which can manifest in fraught interactions among clinicians, law enforcement and security personnel, and carceral facility employees tasked with monitoring incarcerees outside carceral settings.

Background image by Sara Gironi Carnevale.