What's Compassion Got To Do With It? An Empirical Examination of Medical Release in California Prisons

Medical release, often known as compassionate release, medical parole, or humanitarian parole, allows prisoners who are terminally ill or medically incapacitated to be released from prison. This dissertation takes a two-pronged, inductive research strategy to analyze the legislation and implementation of medical release policy, resulting in four distinct analytic chapters. First, legislative histories of medical release bills over the past 20 years document the evolution of this process and are analyzed using social movement and policy development frameworks. At this stage, stakeholders rely on economic justifications for medical release reform. As the first chapter situates medical release law "on-the-books," the second chapter examines medical release law "in action," using official applicant data provided by the CDCR to determine which applicants are more likely to gain release under this policy. Here, a disconnect between legislation and implementation is revealed, as the applicants being released are not members of the populations targeted by reform. The third and fourth chapters combine these data sources to address theoretical concerns created by medical release policy. Chapter 3 introduces the tensions inherent within this process. Medical release, having neither punitive nor rehabilitative goals, presents a site of unique policy within the correctional system. The final chapter focuses on a new conception of the `ailing' penal subject, using accounts included in legislative files to construct a subject who is fundamentally different than the `healthy' penal subject. As the United States faces a growing aging, and increasingly sick, prison population and searches for policies to manage this population, the presentation and acceptance of the ailing penal subject is essential for policy development and success. I conclude this work with a larger discussion on the dangers of privileging cost justifications to the exclusion of others in a policy environment and the ways in which this policy demonstrates how strands of compassion and cruelty are woven throughout the California correctional system. Though focused on California, this research addresses issues facing many other states as well and provides a comprehensive account of a little-researched practice that has pressing human, policy, and correctional concerns.