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Killing For The State: The Darkest Side Of American Nursing, Dave Holmes, Cary H. Federman Mar 2003

Killing For The State: The Darkest Side Of American Nursing, Dave Holmes, Cary H. Federman

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

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 the 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 practices the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization of death work as an application of healthcare professionals’ skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of …


Caring To Death: Health Care Professionals And Capital Punishment, Cary H. Federman, Dave Holmes Oct 2000

Caring To Death: Health Care Professionals And Capital Punishment, Cary H. Federman, Dave Holmes

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The aim of this article is to describe the role of health care professionals in the capital punishment process. The relationship between the protocol of capital punishment in the United States and the use of health care professionals to carry out that task has been overlooked in the literature on punishment. Yet for some time, the operation of the medical sciences in prison have been `part of a disciplinary strategy' `intrinsic to the development of power relationships'. Many capital punishment statutes require medical personnel to be present at, if not actively involved in, executions. Through analyses of these statutes, show …