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Short abstract:

This article explores the healthcare inside Taiwanese prisons. By channeling and connecting the healthcare infrastructure outside the penal institution, Taiwanese prisons encounter the intersected and contradicting logic between punishment and rehabilitation.

Long abstract:

Prisoners are often considered a sicker, unhealthier, and unprivileged population. Healthcare inside prisons, therefore, is one of the social safety nets that provide the minimum healthcare to vulnerable inmates around the world, leading to debates and discussions about the care standards inside correctional facilities. By interviewing and doing ethnographic observation and participation inside a prison clinic in Taiwan, this article illustrates the healthcare inside Taiwanese prisons after the inauguration of National Health Insurance (NHI) in 2013. These just health infrastructures for punishing prisons were delayed almost 20 years after initiating the NHI. With NHI, the civilian hospitals replaced the prison physicians and established prison clinics under contracts with the Department of Corrections, providing clinics with multiple medical specialties and promoting health for prisoners. Although this induction made a breakthrough with the scarcity of prison healthcare, the correctional officials and medical staff from the civilian hospitals encountered the channeling and the balancing between punishment and rehabilitation in their daily work. They diagnose, medicate, manage, and even mandate healthcare with the logic of security and correction, complicating the healthcare inside. This article provides insights into making just healthcare infrastructure inside penal institutions considered unjust for exacerbating and manifesting certain social inequalities. The case of Taiwan, an East Asian post-colonial and developmental society, also shows how one of the most famous welfare and efficient healthcare systems around the world suffered from its high incarceration.