In the United States, the criminal punishment system responds to addiction as a criminal issue, not a health issue. As a result, people with addictions often find themselves in jail or prison rather than in rehabilitation or a hospital. What happens when the prison is addicted to (using psychotropic) drugs to control incarcerated people?
Anthony Ryan Hatch addresses this phenomenon in Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America.
"For at least four decades, U.S. prisons and jails have aggressively turned to psychotropic drugs—antidepressants, antipsychotics, sedatives, and tranquilizers—to silence inmates, whether or not they have been diagnosed with mental illnesses. In Silent Cells, Anthony Ryan Hatch demonstrates that the pervasive use of psychotropic drugs has not only defined and enabled mass incarceration but has also become central to other forms of captivity, including foster homes, military and immigrant detention centers, and nursing homes. This broad indictment of psychotropics is therefore animated by a radical counterfactual question: would incarceration on the scale practiced in the United States even be possible without psychotropics?"
