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. 

The Black Panther as a means of Community among those confined in institutions

Anderson's letter to the editor made the connections between psychiatric and criminal institutions more explicit by noting that the only reason why state hospitals don't need gun towers overseeing the yard is because they have staff firing psychotropic medication.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

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

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

Black Disability Politics

Rayford Anderson August 7, 1976 Letter to the Editor

In the cases of the Vacaville article and Crockett's Letters to the Editor we can see curative violence being enacted through forced medication without regard to how future medication may impact an inmate's ability to stand trial.

 Psychiatric Industrial Complex and Curative Violence

Schalk notes that we should not merely read the connections drawn by the Black Panther newspaper and articles between prisons and psychiatric facilities as oppression analogies and rather, it is important to see that the Panthers understood race, disability, prisons, and psychiatric institutions as inextricably linked - this is also why we see less language around these intuitions being ableist and more around them being generally oppressive.

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