This chapter shows how human sciences researchers in Puerto Rico faced pressure to abandon earlier traditions and embrace the methods and biomedical enterprise of the United States empire’s scientific modernity. Drawing on the history of mental testing and inmate assessment as well as designs for a new penitentiary, the chapter contends that while mid twentieth-century US-American social science engaged in intense processes of othering that aligned with imperial expansion, Puerto Rican social scientists combined US-American psychometrics with older Spanish ethnographic traditions that powerfully resurfaced in the 1940s. These diagnostic and descriptive tools revealed that incarcerated people required discipline, tutelage, and treatment, but that they also had redemptive potential regardless of social difference. Social scientists put mental test results into dialogue with ethnographic narratives of convicts to forge what to them were forward-looking treatment programs, illustrating how racialized racelessness and intersubjective exchanges transformed Puerto Rican corrections for a time. The result was a blended, “creole” nationalist science with decolonial aspirations, although one that was colonial-populist in practice.

This chapter traces the emergence of African American confinement literature in the contemporary African American literary tradition over the past six decades, paying careful attention to the subfield’s examination of racialized and gendered confinement in spaces that include but also extend beyond the carceral geographies of jail and prison. Highlighting the centrality of the literary work of former political prisoner and prison abolitionist Angela Y. Davis to the origins and development of this subfield, this chapter demonstrates how works of African American confinement literature fundamentally eclipse the narrow categorization of “prison writing.” These works explore confinement as both a complicated metaphor for and a recurring lived experience within socially and psychically constricting systems of anti-Black racism, gendered social control, racialized economic exploitation, political repression, and incarceration. In sum, authors of contemporary African American confinement literature draw compelling parallels between the confining racist and sexist institutions and practices from previous eras – such as slavery, the convict lease system, chain gang camps, peonage, lynching, and Jim Crow – and those that persist in the contemporary US carceral state, including racial profiling, state violence, prisoner abuse, policing, and the prison-industrial complex.

Chapter 5 deals extensively with tutelle in the late nineteenth century by concentrating on the working lives of minors, mostly as apprentices and domestics. Minors performed a wide variety of tasks, some of them gender-specific. Young girls did mostly household and domestic tasks; boys became apprentices and learned artisanal crafts. Of the artisanal crafts, carpentry was the most popular, but masons, blacksmiths, tailors, seamstresses, and grain pounders took wards as apprentices. In the 1880s and 1890s, the state confided minors to institutions including Catholic missions, though not always to serve as apprentices. Case studies detail the ways in which their labor was exploited and how they responded to coercion and abuse. They reveal considerable delinquency and misery, which sometimes led to incarceration. The relationship between minors and their guardians in work settings was often characterized by discord, even violence. The chapter explores abuses in tutelle including the hiring out of minors without informing French authorities and the refusal of guardians to compensate minors for their labor when warranted. The chapter analyzes complaints lodged by guardians about minors and the ways in which minors exercised agency. It ends with an exploration of sexual exploitation and prostitution.

The effect of individual governmental drug policies and regulations has, in many cases, been the main driving force behind the direction the opioid epidemic has taken in the United States and many countries around the world. Unfortunately these policies have sometimes had dramatically different effects than were initially intended. Changes in policy which allowed for increased availability of opioid medications had the unintended consequence of widespread opioid addiction and overdose deaths. Policies which aimed to crack down on the diversion of these medications from legitimate medical use resulted in the spike in heroin use as those people who were now addicted to opioids had to turn elsewhere. As demand for heroin surged, so too did manufacturing and sales, and as law enforcement targeted illicit heroin trafficking, cartels turned to the more potent and easier to hide synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and carfentanil. It seems that every governmental policy change or new regulation intended to stop the opioid epidemic is met with a creative solution by the people profiting to keep the opioid trade open.

This last chapter discusses two of Wordsworth’s last poems, written when he was seventy-five – poems about old, poor men in their last days, approaching death. Written in 1846, these poems echo the sea poems of the mid-1830s in that they depict people who have been left lonely and isolated, in this case by the death of loved ones. Wordsworth shows extreme old age as a time of alienation, even when the aged person lives where he has always lived. His family having died, he has no one with whom to practise the daily rituals and routines that renew love and secure identity. Memory and recollection do not suffice to restore the missing presence; the self cannot sustain itself by enshrining the spirit of the past. Expressing this bleak view about the limitations of memorialisation, the poems are in dialogue with Wordsworth’s past work: they depict the aged like the sailor of ‘Composed by the Sea Shore’ and the heroine of ‘The Somnambulist’, but unlike the Wordsworth of The Prelude. They are also in dialogue with a large and noisy public campaign, in which the life, and the death, of the elderly poor was a controversial topic.

Violence is more common in prisons than in the community. Mental disorders are over-represented in this population, and are associated with an even higher risk of perpetrating or becoming a victim of prison violence. Violence in this environment has unique characteristics, strongly influenced by gangs and an illicit economy. This chapter reviews the causes and management of prison violence, and the role of the mental health clinician in the assessment and management of violence in prison relating to mental disorder. The early impact of COVID-19 on prison violence is described.

Edyta M. Bojanowska reflects on the significance of Chekhov’s arduous mid-career journey to Russia’s penal colony in the North Pacific, both in terms of the genre-bending book of documentary scholarship that the voyage yielded and in the significant reconsideration of empire, colonization, corporal punishment, and incarceration that Chekhov’s work on the island informed.

A director who has facilitated Shakespeare programmes in prisons for fifteen years in conversation with a former prisoner who served eighteen years and who participated in four of those programmes. The authors explore the ways in which performative Shakespeare programmes fill a niche otherwise unoccupied in the prison system – a recreational programme that offers opportunities for collaboration, growth and the development of empathic and communication skills that are not constrained by a deficit-based and outcome-oriented pedagogy. The programme offers models of camaraderie and support that are not ‘in opposition to’ other groups, and promotes collaborative over individual achievement. The development of intrinsic motivation is a key component in functioning as a free citizen, but is actively discouraged by the correctional system. Prison Shakespeare programmes develop these skills in addition to offering a practical critique to the model of ‘toughness’ promoted by the prisoners’ own cultural milieu. The chapter speaks to the value of recreation for its own sake, and how it can be a vital component in both education and rehabilitation precisely because it does not set out to do either.