Session 2: Medicine in Context: Ethics, Power and Carcerality. By Preeti Juturu

Session Objectives:

By the end of the workshop, students will be able to:

1. Describe incarceration as a structural factor that shapes health outcomes and functional capacity.

2. Analyze how conditions of confinement affect medical decision-making and the practice of informed consent.

3. Engage with accounts from formerly incarcerated individuals as primary sources of knowledge about healthcare experiences.

4. Compare reform-oriented and abolition-oriented frameworks for understanding carceral healthcare systems.

This Module Draws from: The Legal Determinants of Health: From Incarceration to Accessibility 

• The Legal Determinants of Health: From Incarceration to Accessibility brings together six cutting-edge essays that expose how legal systems—through incarceration, detention, disability law, tort doctrine, and human subjects research—profoundly shape health outcomes and perpetuate structural inequality. From forced sterilizations in prisons to the hidden burdens of self-accommodation, the authors reveal how law can both cause and conceal harm, especially among marginalized populations. Blending bioethics, legal history, disability studies, and public health, this volume challenges readers to rethink what justice and autonomy mean in environments defined by surveillance, stigma, and institutional neglect—and calls for bold legal and structural reforms to achieve genuine health equity.

• Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96j9n0nj