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.
The overarching puzzle underlying this project crystallised during the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis revealed that prison services in even more transparent, rule-of-law democracies like the UK or the US somewhat reluctantly published prisoners’ health data. Rumours alluded to the manipulation of reported statistics with the aim of making them look better in the court of public opinion. In authoritarian countries like Russia, activists even accused the penal administration of falsifying mortality and morbidity. This pervasive reticence of officials on prisoners’ health, regardless of context, intrigued me as a historian of bureaucratic malfeasance. From my research, I knew that functionaries of the Gulag, a system of forced labour camps under Stalin, systematically underreported sickness, epidemics, and death. They released and transferred dying prisoners to report low numbers to their superiors. Nevertheless, because the Gulag case was so distinct, I never looked for anything vaguely similar in Western democracies.
However, incrementally, it seemed that I began to discern some pattern or logic, driven by the desire of bureaucracies to conceal "bad news" about prisoners’ well-being from the outer world in wildly dissimilar contexts. Donald Trump’s attempt to artificially suppress the US numbers of coronavirus cases by locking infected passengers on the Diamond Princess ship in March 2020 made my suspicion stronger. Trump proclaimed that he does not "need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault." His stance evinced an explicit motive to avoid exacerbating politically sensitive statistics. The 2021 scandal around the concealment of pandemic deaths in New York’s nursing homes by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration and similar allegations against Russian hospitals made me entertain an even bolder conjecture. Did this putative pattern manifest, in addition to prisons, in other prison-like total institutions like concentration camps, asylums, residential schools, or hospitals? (Goffman, 1961) It seemed that the pandemic might have elucidated something all-embracing and profound but still poorly understood about the operational logic of modern total institutions worldwide. I also realised that this alleged pattern's obscure origins, manifestations, and heritage could be illuminated only through historical comparative analysis over a more extended period. COVID-19 is likely not the first time this presumed logic has emerged.
Therefore, the project's first global aim is to determine whether the penchant to conceal poor health data from the public eye is a universal pattern, intrinsic to modern total institutions, no matter the authoritarian or democratic contex or just happenstance. The research seeks to shed light on when and why this presumed pattern appeared historically for the first time, how it spread across borders and institutions, and how it changed over more than two centuries from the early 1800s to the present.
Nonetheless, as COVID-19 reaffirmed, accountable liberal polities still behaved very differently from non-transparent, authoritarian ones. Moreover, historically, even within the authoritarian spectrum, some cases are extreme (e.g., "states of exception" like Hitler’s, Mao’s, and Stalin’s camps). For example, one recent, untested argument posited that the Gulag authorities murdered several million inmates and covered up their extermination with deceptive releases of dying prisoners (Alexopoulos, 2017). This accusation, even if untenable, is implausible for most prison systems. It highlights something very peculiar about the Gulag case. However, it is still unclear what causes these fundamental ruptures between and within liberal, authoritarian regimes and outliers like the Gulag.
Hence, the project's second global aim is to explain why some systems become extreme examples of this presumed pattern of "everyday economy with the truth." The project disentangles precise historical circumstances when these extremes reach a certain threshold, and falsifying health data becomes a defining central feature of the system, even raising suspicions about the premeditated annihilation of prisoners via deception in certain cases.
The ambition behind the project’s aims is to revise the traditional way literature classifies penal systems globally. This revision is achieved by shifting attention to health and its reporting as a defining feature that separates various carceral regimes from each other, a neglected issue in theorizing prisons. Thus, Gresham Sykes’s "pains of imprisonment" omitted health (Sykes, 1958). Investigating penal healthcare reporting and its manipulation garners deeper insights into societies themselves. It comes with a whole set of behaviors and practices that reveal far more about how total institutions understand their role in different societies and the values placed on the rights to life of society’s deviants, offenders, and political opponents. Ultimately, the project will generate a new taxonomy of penal systems based on the criterion of health reporting and its honesty.
The interdisciplinary research effort, while historical, combines insights from medical statistics, penology, criminology, penal sociology, and bioethics. It seeks to offer scholars, governments, and human rights-focused NGOs a toolkit of quantitative and qualitative methods to detect various types of bias, including racial and ethnic, in historical and present-day sources on prisoners’ health. Beyond the strictly academic contribution to the debates on penality, modernity, technocratic social engineering, legacies of colonial violence, and total institutions, the project has implications for humanitarian pressure groups and international prison reform.
Objectives and Questions
1. To trace the origins of the "governance by indicators" (Davis et al., 2015), a bureaucratic obsession with quantification and resultant attempts to game the health reports in the early 1800s to their legacies in present-day institutions. To delineate how and why these malpractices changed over time. To reveal penal administrators' motives to conceal inmates’ morbidity and death and identify the most significant statistical and rhetorical techniques to do so in the case studies.
2. To identify similarities and divergences in malpractices to conceal health data between and within liberal penal systems (e.g., British metropolitan, convict lease in the American South, and present-day US) versus authoritarian ones (e.g., colonial Indian jails), including extreme cases (e.g., the Gulag). Most crucially, to expound why they appear, avoiding false equivalences and monocausal explanations.
3. To determine whether medical release and transfer procedures were animated by a similar rationale across all case studies: to sanitize reported data to avoid scrutiny and project an image of efficacy for intended audiences. To uncover if these procedures obfuscated the bureaucratically organised murder of several million prisoners in the extreme case of the Gulag. To assess if the Gulag was a death camp and if medical release comprised a crime of commission or omission.
4. To investigate the inter-imperial connection by testing the broader continuity thesis between the Gulag and the colonial concentration (e.g., British India) or overtly racist regimes (e.g., the American New South) using manipulations of health data as a case in point. To understand whether it is indeed a verifiable causal link or, conversely, a terminological rather than empirical similarity misidentified for causation.
5. To examine the intra-imperial exchange of practices to hide prisoner sickness and death between British metropolitan prisons and Indian colonial jails. To understand how indigenous prisoners' allegedly distorted health data reified the racial and cultural hierarchies of colonial society in India. To uncover the multivalent relationship between the prisoners’ health, death, and race/ethnicity in administration reports of convict lease penitentiaries and present-day US prisons. To compare colonial Indian and US patterns of essentialising to distinct othering of ethnic minorities in the Gulag’s medical reporting.
The following questions are considered:
Question 1. Did a universal propensity to occasionally conceal the poor health of inmates truly exist in Western total institutions? What were the material and intellectual underpinnings for it to emerge?
Question 2. How did this alleged pattern spread across time and space? Did it survive until the present?
Question 3. Are prisons and camps the only total institutions that seek to minimise the appearance of reported sickness and mortality of their inmates?
Question 4. Did British, Indian colonial, and American prisons sometimes misapplied the procedures of early release and transfers with identical rationale as in the Gulag – to massage reported health data?
Question 5. If this universal release-to-die practice indeed existed, what were the phenomenological similarities and divergences between the liberal cases (the UK, the US) versus authoritarian ones (colonial India) in causes, effects, and concrete types of deception? Why and when did they appear? What causal factors made extreme examples of this pattern (e.g., the Gulag) aberrant?
Question 6. Was the Gulag a death camp? Did six million Gulag’s victims die, concealed by releases?
Question 7. Where did the Gulag's malpractices originate? Were they somehow foreshadowed by antecedents in the deadly, racist Indian colonial or convict lease contexts? (colonial boomerang thesis) Or were they driven by a unique constellation of factors, following a Sonderweg, a special path (a sui generis thesis)?
Question 8. How seriously, in quantitative and qualitative terms, were the health reports in the chosen case studies vitiated?
Question 9. Was the degree of their unreliability in the case of colonial India so drastic that it reduced jail health reports to an elite representation of the empire to justify conquest?
Question 10. Did the presumed obfuscation of health data in Indian jails in some ways exemplify the "essentialised difference between coloniser and colonised"?