Similar to the usage of the prison industrial complex as a term used to describe the privatization of prisons in the United States and how prisons get monetary benefit from people being incarcerated so they don't have a monetary incentive to actually decrease re-incarceration and have more of a monetary incentive to keep people in prison. The psychiatric industrial complex is a term used to describe how psychiatry creates a space that derives monetary benefit off of having being confined in psychiatric institutions or people continuously needing to access psychiatric care to get medication.

The Psychiatric Industrial Complex

Curative Violence was a term coined by Eunjung Kim to describe the physical and material violence inflicted against disabled people that is justified as a cure. Kim uses the term cure to mean any attempt to lessen or eliminate illness or disability. Curative violence is meant to give voice to the fact that society's ableist obsessions with curing disabled and chronically ill folk can result in further disability, or even death.

Curative Violence

The Vacaville article notes how that the time an inmate spends in psychiatric care, even when that care is forced, is not counted to the length of their sentence. We see this same sentiment in Crockett's pieces. These accounts detail  what is often considered or termed as the psychiatric industrial complex.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

"Vacaville - American Headquarters for Medical Genocide" was a story published in the Black Panther newspaper in June 26, 1971 which detailed the medical and legal abuses that occurred at the Vacaville Medical Center which was a part of the California state prison system. This article brought to light the drug and dosage experiments being performed on Vacaville patients that often had disabling effects. The individuals held at Vacaville were placed there because they were considered discipline problems at other penal institutions. The article in the Black Panther newspaper argued that drug testing was used as a means of control against activists who protest the oppression they face both inside and outside incarcertation.

"Vacaville - American Headquarters for Medical Genocide"

In this second letter to the editor Crockett and his cosigners charge Chester Mental Health Center with violations of mental health code and request legal assistance from the BPP.
In these charges, Crockett reiterates that the patients' experience with forced pharmaceutical treatment is the only therapy patients receive at Chester. Crockett states that many nonviolent patients are subjected to chemotherapy. This forced medication starts a cycle where patients are found incompetent to stand trial and in need of more medication against their will, and those patients are held and forcibly medicated in lieu of trial. This is shown as an example of how the industry of psychiatry at this time worked in conjunction with the prison system to segregate, confine, and contril Black people with and without disabilities.

May 1, 1976 Letter to the Editor by Crocket and five other Chester patients

In the Letter to the Editor Crockett described how he was compelled to take medication four times a day because his psychiatrist said he had an explosive personality. When those incarcerated at Chester refused to take medication they were either compelled through force or given medication through a shot. 
Crockett also uses the rhetoric that he is "supposed to be a schizophrenic" this wording of "supposed to be" encourages readers to question the validity of this diagnosis given by an establishment psychiatrist.

Crockett's Experience with Over Medicalization

Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027003

Black Disability Politics

Psychiatric and Carceral Systems

- Articles Putting Pressure on Vacaville
- David Hilliard Autobiography
- "Tearing Out Our Thoughts: Psychosurgery and the Black Community"
- California State Senate Hearings
- Stories Run Concurrently with 504 Sit-In

Black Panther Party Fight Against Return of Psychosurgery

We know the Black Panther was delivered to people in some prisons as a means of connection, education, and empowerment. There is also evidence that it was delivered to those in psychiatric institutions with the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola having its own chapter of the Black Panther Party. The Letters to the Editor from Crockett and Anderson also suggest that the paper was distributed near some prisons hospital wards. The Black Panther as highlighted in Anderson's piece was essential for folks developing their own critical perspective on their own confinement in mental hospitals. 

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