Being a good inmate: vaccination and other health interventions in county jail

Why do covid-19 vaccine skeptics take the vaccine while living in jail? This question speaks to a broader issue of how carceral settings influence people’s perceptions towards receiving health interventions while incarcerated. Drawing on 73 in-depth interviews with people living in one Bay Area, California jail, this paper explains why people who are skeptical about the covid-19 vaccine’s safety and efficacy nevertheless accepted a dose while living in jail: as strategic response to carceral logic. According to interview participants, jail management rewards good inmates—people who are compliant with the jail’s vague rules, who are needless to the point of near-invisibility, and who are even helpful to penal management—with basic resources in a setting of extreme deprivation. For vaccine skeptics, taking the covid-19 vaccine is an attempt at demonstrating manageability under these conditions, which could potentially lead them to access to resources within the jail like food, movement, and showers. These findings have implications for understanding how carceral settings and their logics influence how people living inside receive health and medical interventions more broadly. On the one hand, compliance with carceral logic can encourage the uptake of beneficial programmatic health interventions like vaccination; on the other hand, the logic encourages medical avoidance for individualized, resource-cumbersome health care and reproduces health inequality.