{"doi":"10.1093/jahist/jaae267","title":"Medical Diagnosis and the Contours of the Carceral State: Health, Power, and Protest in a World War II–Era Prison Hospital","abstract":"Mourning the death of their twenty-one-year-old brother, Minnie Conners and Robert White sought answers from government officials.Why did James White have bruises and welts covering his body when he was pronounced dead at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners (mcfp) in Springfield, Missouri, on December 8, 1943?White had spent the last months of his life being transferred from one Bureau of Prisons (bop) facility to another.The cause of death, bop officials maintained, was \"dehydration, due to acute psychosis, due to dementia praecox, catatonic type.\" 1 James White's case hints at a wider historical phenomenon.Around the time of the young man's death, an increasing reliance on medical rhetoric and diagnosis began to reshape the infrastructure of prison systems and bureaucracies, effect the daily experiences and long-term fates of incarcerated people, and influence representations and perceptions of dissent behind the walls.mcfp records reveal that, by the end of World War II, prison officials were relying on often vaguely defined diagnoses of mental illness to both create and justify questionable conditions and outcomes inside prisons.Prior to the opening of the mcfp in 1930, boosters imagined the institution as a site for treating and curing a wide range of conditions, but it soon became clear that administrators and staff throughout the federal prison system were transferring people to the facility based on institutional priorities rather than to protect individuals' well-being.Questionably applied diagnoses offered mcfp staff power to claim that violence and untimely","journal":"Journal of American History","year":2025,"id":563626,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9561,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1051819,"name":"Jessica L. Adler","orcid":"0000-0002-8632-1803","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:56:17.117043Z","pmid":"41868419","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}