Abstract
This article discusses how mental health staff at a California juvenile detention center coerced young women into taking pharmaceutical drugs. Current empirical work discusses the negative effects of consuming pharmaceutical grade drugs. Some work has addressed how incarcerated individuals are forcibly sedated with these medications. We use a legal violence framework, however, to show how legal proceedings allow medical staff at our site to coerce youth into invasive therapy and eventually into consuming pharmaceutical drugs. We call this multiple stage process pharmaceutical violence. Based on 24 months of ethnographic research, we describe the three phases of pharmaceutical violence and how it negatively affects the youth in our study. Our findings shed light on research related to mental health, legal violence and the experiences of incarcerated youth.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The first author collected all the data for this article. The writing, editing and analysis were undertaken collaboratively. For the sake of expediency and style, “we” is used in this section instead of “I” or the name of the first author.
To protect the identity of the young people, we have changed the name of the juvenile detention center where we conducted our research. All of the names used in this article are pseudonyms that were chosen by our research participants.
For the purposes of this article, we adopt the definition of “psychotropic” as defined by the Code of Federal Regulations (42 C.F.R. § 483.45(c)(3)(i–iv)):
- (3)
A psychotropic drug is any drug that affects brain activities associated with mental processes and behavior. These drugs include, but are not limited to, drugs in the following categories:
- (i)
Antipsychotic;
- (ii)
Antidepressant;
- (iii)
Antianxiety; and
- (iv)
Hypnotic.
- (i)
While some young women in this study reported that they were prescribed antianxiety and/or antidepressants, others did not know the name or type of medication that they had been given and could indicate only whether the medication had been prescribed by a psychiatrist.
- (3)
“Latinx” is a gender-neutral label for Latina/o and or Latin@ (see Salinas and Lozano 2017).
In Washington v. Harper, 494 U.S. 210 (1990), the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Due Process Clause of the US Constitution permits a state to treat an incarcerated individual who has a serious mental disorder or illness with antipsychotic medication against his or her will, provided that the individual is a danger to himself or herself or others and that the medication prescribed is an effective means of treating and controlling a mental illness that is likely to cause violent behavior.
The city of El Valle is approximately 74% Latino/a. White Americans make up most of the remaining population. Almost all the youth were arrested for minor drug-related or status offenses.
Our analysis also included a thorough examination of “negative cases” or alternative explanations. When we were confronted with a negative case, we addressed it in the text or incorporated into our larger analysis.
Our participants referred to the mental health practitioner in this detention center as a “psychologist,” but he was in fact a psychiatrist licensed to prescribe medications.
The diagnosis and medicating of these young people were conducted by one lead psychiatrist and a team of mental health workers. To the best of our knowledge, this lead doctor oversaw all diagnosis and medications that were distributed in the facility.
References
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Agnew, R. (2003). An integrated theory of the adolescent peak in offending. Youth & Society,34(3), 263–299.
Alexander, R., Jr. (1988). Mental health treatment refusal in correctional institutions: A sociological and legal analysis. Jounal of Sociology & Social Welfare,15(3), 83–99.
Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: New Press.
Arredondo, G., Hurtado, A., Klahn, N., Nájera-Ramírez, O., & Zavella, P. (2003). Chicana feminisms: A critical reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Babcock, Q., & Byrne, T. (2000). Student perceptions of methylphenidate abuse at a public liberal arts college. Journal of American College Health,49(3), 143–145.
Bell, D. A. J. (1980). Brown v. Board of Education and the interest-convergence dilemma. Harvard Law Review,99(3), 518–533.
Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (2004). Symbolic violence. In P. Bourgois & N. Scheper-Hughes (Eds.), Violence in war and peace (pp. 272–274). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Brewer, R. M., & Heitzeg, N. A. (2008). The racialization of crime and punishment: Criminal justice, color-blind racism, and the political economy of the prison industrial complex. American Behavioral Scientist, 51(5), 625–644.
Brisman, A. (2013). The violence of silence: Some reflections on access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to justice in matters concerning the environment. Crime, Law and Social Change,59(3), 291–303.
Brisman, A., & South, N. (2013). Resource wealth, power, crime, and conflict. In R. Walters, D. Solomon Westerhuis, & T. Wyatt (Eds.), Emerging issues in green criminology: Exploring power, justice and harm (pp. 57–71). Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brom, D., Stokar, Y., Lawi, C., Nuriel‐Porat, V., Ziv, Y., Lerner, K., & Ross, G. (2017). Somatic experiencing for posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled outcome study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 30(3), 304–312.
Brown, M. (2009). The culture of punishment: Prison, society, and spectacle. New York: New York University Press.
Chesney-Lind, M., & Pasko, L. (2013). The female offender: Girls, women, and crime. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Chunn, D. E., & Menzies R. J. (1990). Gender, madness and crime: The reproduction of patriarchal and class relations in a psychiatric court clinic. The Journal of Human Justice, 1(2), 33–54.
Cover, R. M. (1975). Justice accused: Antislavery and the judicial process. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum,1989(1), 139–167.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review,43(6), 1241–1299.
Currie, E. (2005). The road to whatever: Middle-class culture and the crisis of adolescence. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Davis, A. Y. (2003). Race and criminalization: Black Americans and the punishment industry. In E. McLaughin & J. Muncie (Eds.), Criminological perspectives: Essential readings (pp. 284–310). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Davis, A. Y., & Shaylor, C. (2001). Race, gender, and the prison industrial complex: California and beyond. Meridians: Feminism, Race Transnationalism,2(1), 1–25.
Díaz-Cotto, J. (2006). Chicana lives and criminal justice: Voices from El Barrio. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Farmer, P. (2004). Pathologies of power: Health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Finlay, L. (2002). Negotiating the swamp: the opportunity and challenge of reflexivity in research practice. Qualitative Research, 2(2), 209–230.
Flores, J., Camacho, O. A. & Santos, X. (2018). Gender on the run: Wanted Latinas in a southern California barrio. Feminist Criminology, 12(3), 248–268.
Flores, J. (2016). Caught up: Girls, surveillance and wraparound incarceration. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Fontaine, R., Chouinard, G., & Annable, L. (1984). Rebound anxiety in anxious patients after abrupt withdrawal of benzodiazepine treatment. The American Journal of Psychiatry,141(7), 848–852.
Ford, J. A. (2008). Nonmedical prescription drug use and delinquency: An analysis with a national sample. Journal of Drug Issues,38(2), 493–516.
Ford, J. A. (2009). Nonmedical prescription drug use among adolescents: The influence of bonds to family and school. Youth & Society,40(3), 336–352.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
Hatch, A. R., & Bradley, K. (2016). Prisons matter: Psychotropics and the trope of silence in technocorrections. In V. Pitts-Taylor (Ed.), Mattering: Feminism, science, and materialism (pp. 224–237). New York: New York University Press.
Henne, K., & Troshynski, E. (2013). Mapping the margins of intersectionality: Criminological possibilities in a transnational world. Theoretical Criminology,17(4), 455–473.
Henne, K., & Troshynski, E. I., (2019). Intersectional criminologies for the contemporary moment: Crucial questions of power, praxis and technologies of control. Critical Criminology: An International Journal, 27(1), 55–71.
Higgins, G. E., Mahoney, M., & Ricketts, M. L. (2009). Nonsocial reinforcement of the nonmedical use of prescription drugs: A partial test of social learning and self-control theories. Journal of Drug Issues,39(4), 949–963.
Hill Collins, P. (1993). The sexual politics of black womanhood. In P. B. Bart & E. G. Moran (Eds.), Violence against women: The bloody footprints (pp. 85–104). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Houser, K. A., Belenko, S., & Brennan, P. K. (2012). The effects of mental health and substance abuse disorders on institutional misconduct among female inmates. Justice Quarterly,29(6), 799–828.
Jackman, M. R. (1994). The velvet glove: Paternalism and conflict in gender, class, and race relations. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Jackman, M. R. (2002). Violence in social life. Annual Review of Sociology,28(1), 387–415.
Jones, N. (2010). It’s about being a survivor. In M. Chesney-Lind & N. Jones (Eds.), Fighting for girls: New perspectives on gender and violence (pp. 203–218). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Knepper, K. (1996). The importance of establishing competence in cases involving the involuntary administration of psychotropic medications. Law and Psychology Review,20(1), 97–137.
Low, K. G., & Gendaszek, A. (2002). Illicit use of psychostimulants among college students: A preliminary study. Psychology, Health & Medicine,7(3), 283–287.
Maes, M., Song, C., Lin, A. H., Bonaccorso, S., Kenis, G., De Jongh, R., et al. (1999). Negative immunoregulatory effects of antidepressants: Inhibition of interferon-γ and stimulation of interleukin-10 secretion. Neuropsychopharmacology,20(4), 370.
McCabe, S. E., Boyd, C. J., & Young, A. (2007). Medical and nonmedical use of prescription drugs among secondary school students. Journal of Adolescent Health,40(1), 76–83.
McKee, J., Penn, J. V., & Koranek, A. (2014). Psychoactive medication misadventuring in correctional health care. Journal of Correctional Health Care, 20(3), 249–260.
Menjívar, C., & Abrego, L. (2012). Legal violence: Immigration law and the lives of Central American immigrants. American Journal of Sociology,117(5), 1380–1421.
Mumola, C. J., & Karberg, J. C. (2006). Drug use and dependence, state and federal prisoners, 2004. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Nadelmann, E. A. (2004). Criminologists and punitive drug prohibition: To serve or to challenge? Criminology & Public Policy,3(3), 441–450.
Olfson, M., King, M., & Schoenbaum, M. (2015). Benzodiazepine use in the United States. JAMA Psychiatry,72(2), 136–142.
Rhodes, L. A. (2004). Total confinement: Madness and reason in the maximum security prison. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Rios, V. M. (2011). Punished: Policing the lives of Black and Latino boys. New York: New York University Press.
Rios, V. M. (2017). Human targets: Schools, police, and the criminalization of Latino youth. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Salinas, C., Jr., & Lozano, A. (2017). Mapping and recontextualizing the evolution of the term Latinx: An environmental scanning in higher education. Journal of Latinos and Education,18(4), 1–14.
Schweizer, E., Rickels, K., Case, W. G., & Greenblatt, D. J. (1991). Carbamazepine treatment in patients discontinuing long-term benzodiazepine therapy: Effects on withdrawal severity and outcome. Archives of General Psychiatry,48(5), 448–452.
Smith, G. M., Davis, R. H., Altenor, A., Tran, D. P., Wolfe, K. L., Deegan, J. A., et al. (2008). Psychiatric use of unscheduled medications in the Pennsylvania state hospital system: Effects of discontinuing the use of PRN orders. Community Mental Health Journal,44(4), 261–270.
Sugie, N. F., & Turney, K. (2017). Beyond incarceration: Criminal justice contact and mental health. American Sociological Review,82(4), 719–743.
Veneziano, C. A. (1986). Prison inmates and consent to treatment: Problems and issues. Law & Psychology Review,129(10), 129–146.
West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender & Society, 1(2), 125–151.
Williams, P. (1987). Spirit-murdering the messenger: The discourse of fingerpointing as the law’s response to racism. Univeristy of Miami Law Review,42(1), 127–157.
Zaitzow, B. H. (2010). Psychotropic control of women prisoners: The perpetuation of abuse of imprisoned women. Justice Policy Journal,7(2), 1–37.
Ziarek, E. P. (2008). Bare life on strike: Notes on the biopolitics of race and gender. South Atlantic Quarterly,107(1), 89–105.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Flores, J., Barahona-López, K. “It’s Like Everyone’s Trying to Put Pills in You”: Pharmaceutical Violence and Harmful Mental Health Services Inside a California Juvenile Detention Center. Crit Crim 27, 643–662 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-019-09480-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-019-09480-6