This project investigates how penal authorities, in both liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, deliberately downplay prisoners' poor health for a variety of reasons, using a repertoire of statistical and rhetorical techniques. It poses "big questions" about the operational logic of modern penality and bureaucracy, specifically through the lens of prisoner health management and epidemic control. It scrutinises British metropolitan, Indian colonial, American, and Soviet-Russian prisons and camps from the emergence of the Western penitentiary in the late modern period through to the present day.