Listening for the sounds of silence: a nursing consideration of caring for the politically tortured

Killing for the state: the darkest side of American nursing

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of the international nursing community the discrepancy between a pervasive 'caring' nursing discourse and a most unethical nursing practice in the United States. In this article, we present a duality: the conflict in American prisons between nursing ethics and the killing machinery. The US penal system is a setting in which trained healthcare personnel practice the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization of deathwork as an application of healthcare professionals' skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of the states' death penalty statutes shows that healthcare workers are involved in the capital punishment process and shielded by American laws (and to a certain extent by professional boards through their inaction). We also argue that the law's language often masks that involvement; and explain how states further that duplicity behind legal formalisms. In considering the important role healthcare providers, namely nurses and physicians, play in administering death to the condemned, we assert that nurses and physicians are part of the states' penal machinery in America. Nurses and physicians (as carriers of scientific knowledge, and also as agents of care) are intrinsic to the American killing enterprise. Healthcare professionals who take part in execution protocols are state functionaries who approach the condemned body as angels of death: they constitute an extension of the state which exercises its sovereign power over captive prisoners.

Nursing with prisoners: the practice of caring, forensic nursing or penal harm nursing?

The number of incarcerated persons in the United States has been increasing dramatically over the last two decades. Incarcerated men and women have increased rates of serious and chronic physical and mental illnesses and therefore require substantial health care efforts. Caring for prisoners is a difficult and often unrewarding experience for health care providers, particularly within a social climate that encourages noncaring behaviors. This article critically analyzes three philosophic stances toward nursing care with prisoners and suggests their philosophic commensurability within traditional nursing practice. Implications for nursing practice, research, and education are discussed.