Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 3-7-2003
Journal / Book Title
Nursing Inquiry
Abstract
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 the states’ death penalty statutes shows that healthcare workers are involved in the capital punishment process and shielded by American laws (and to a certain extent by professional boards through their inaction). We also argue that the law's language often masks that involvement, and explain how states further that duplicity behind legal formalisms. In considering the important role healthcare providers, namely nurses and physicians, play in administering death to the condemned, we assert that nurses and physicians are part of the states’ penal machinery in America. Nurses and physicians (as carriers of scientific knowledge, and also as agents of care) are intrinsic to the American killing enterprise. Healthcare professionals who take part in execution protocols are state functionaries who approach the condemned body as angels of death: they constitute an extension of the state which exercises its sovereign power over captive prisoners.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-1800.2003.00162.x
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Holmes, Dave and Federman, Cary H., "Killing for the state: the darkest side of American nursing" (2003). Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 168.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/justice-studies-facpubs/168
Published Citation
Holmes, Dave, and Cary Federman. "Killing for the state: the darkest side of American nursing." Nursing Inquiry 10, no. 1 (2003): 2-10. Harvard
Included in
Bioethics and Medical Ethics Commons, Criminal Law Commons, Criminal Procedure Commons, Criminology Commons, Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Demography, Population, and Ecology Commons, Health Law and Policy Commons, Medical Humanities Commons, Other Sociology Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, Social Justice Commons, Social Work Commons, Work, Economy and Organizations Commons