Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America

by Anthony Ryan Hatch

A critical investigation into the use of psychotropic drugs to pacify and control inmates and other captives in the vast U.S. prison, military, and welfare systems For at least four decades, U.S. prisons and jails have aggressively turned to psychotropic drugs—antidepressants, antipsychotics, sedatives, and tranquilizers—to silence inmates, whether or not they have been diagnosed with mental illnesses. In Silent Cells , Anthony Ryan Hatch demonstrates that the pervasive use of psychotropic drugs has not only defined and enabled mass incarceration but has also become central to other forms of captivity, including foster homes, military and immigrant detention centers, and nursing homes.  Silent Cells shows how, in shockingly large numbers, federal, state, and local governments and government-authorized private agencies pacify people with drugs, uncovering patterns of institutional violence that threaten basic human and civil rights. Drawing on publicly available records, Hatch unearths the coercive ways that psychotropics serve to manufacture compliance and docility, practices hidden behind layers of state secrecy, medical complicity, and corporate profiteering. Psychotropics, Hatch shows, are integral to “technocorrectional” policies devised to minimize public costs and increase the private profitability of mass captivity while guaranteeing public safety and national security. This broad indictment of psychotropics is therefore animated by a radical counterfactual would incarceration on the scale practiced in the United States even be possible without psychotropics?

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Medicine, Race, History, Science

184 pages, Paperback

Published April 30, 2019

Reviews

[Cristie Underwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author's painstaking research and attention to detail is obvious in the writing of this book. There were many facts that I only discovered after reading this!

[Jen Juenke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really excited to dive into this book and explore all of the ways in which the government and institutions force psychotropic medications upon them. YET, this book fell short.
The author explores several areas: prisons, military, nursing homes, and sex offenders. Yet I feel that the overall depth of the book is lacking.
The prison portion took up the most space in the book, yet was the most disappointing. From the lack of surveys, lack of knowledge, lack of just about everything, it was hard to draw any conclusions from this lack of evidence, yet the author tried HARD to equate an increase in spending in psychotropics to racism.
I wondered if perhaps the author should have went to a county jail, a state prison, etc and do a survey himself, instead of just analyzing the past surveys.
Moving on to the military, again the author tried very, very hard to paint the picture of the government opening up and using psychotropics on unwilling service personnel.
Yet the author admits that the military takes more people who are mentally damaged in some way.
Overall, the book fell flat, the author did NOT have enough data to reach any of his conclusions and the only positive thing is that maybe there will be some accountability in prison pharmacy's.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intense and powerful, this book provides a startling and thorough (as one can be in a realm of hidden information and willfully blank records) of the history of psychotropic drug in America's institutions. In a time with race and the criminal justice system are at the forefront of our country's mind, this book is essential reading material. Looking in terms of both legality and morality, readers are forced to examine our own complicity in and acceptance of the drugging of captive America. What problematic norms are we accepting and how can we change the fate of society's most vulnerable?

[Madi · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...The institutions that make up the carceral state, some of the most powerful institutions in the United States, are completely hooked—literally addicted to and dependent on [psychotropic] drugs. And this has become a massive, hidden, and taken-for-granted problem in our society because it conceals inhumane practices of confinement that allow us to hold millions of people against their will by directly changing their will."

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the content and message are extremely important and valid, I feel that the researcher generalizes the use of psychiatry outside of carceral spaces in a way that is not helpful.

[Rob Wipond · Rating 5 out of 5]

An academic book, but infused with some real passion and dogged research into an area that's literally behind closed, locked doors.