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Short abstract:

(How) can telemedicine be used to provide "just" infrastructures of care to people who are incarcerated? I explore which notions of "just health(care)"—for instance, health that is fair, equitable, sufficient—are embedded and negotiated in healthcare infrastructures for correctional facilities.

Long abstract:

Correctional facilities, and "carceral healthcare" more generally, are scrutinized worldwide for neglecting the basic health needs of people who are incarcerated. Simultaneously, labor shortages in healthcare professions make it difficult to find adequate in-person care for incarcerated patients. With healthcare and policy actors alike conceptualizing of people who are incarcerated both as extremely vulnerable and notoriously "difficult to treat," telemedicine tools are being implemented and touted as providing "just" (alternative) healthcare infrastructures for incarcerated populations. Following the implementation process of telemedical care infrastructures in 28 correctional facilities in Austria, my research project explores different notions of what it means to provide "just health(care)" in the context of correctional facilities and the carceral state. Based on extensive interviews with employees of correctional facilities, my research shows that "just" infrastructures for healthcare span to include notions of equity and fairness, ethical and "good" (quality of) care, but also "justice" in the sense of adequacy and proportionality in solidarity-based healthcare systems with finite resources. I hypothesize that when changes are made to infrastructures of care, e.g. by implementing telemedicine, the existing strengths and weaknesses of systems are concurrently revealed. As such, the implementation of telemedicine is an opportunity to expand our understandings of what health, well-being or "being well," could truly mean in the context of incarcerated life and beyond—and how technologized infrastructures of care can help (re)imagine transformations of care in the penal system writ large.