Uncanny Persistence
Death in a Detention Center
Laila Riazi 
In mid-March 2021, a new inmate was enrolled at the West Valley Detention Center, four months pregnant and schizophrenic. Though she had a name, the deputies christened her anew. Crazy, they called her. Within the hour, she had been stripped of her jeans and sweater, forced into a padded safe room, and left there, unobserved.
The following day, a lone sheriff appeared at her father’s doorstep, alerting him to the news that his daughter had badly hurt her head. The paramedics had cleaved purposefully through the ripple of midafternoon traffic; they had deposited her at a nearby hospital. It was there that X returned that same week after what staff called a “choking incident.” This time, doctors concurred, there would be no recovery.
Since then, West Valley has still not shared X’s autopsy report, nor have they detailed the specific nature of her arrest, detention, and hospitalization. Two years later, an official paper certificate still lists the cause of her death as “pending.” That this detail can only matter for the living will dwarf, at any given moment, the felt urgency of recovering it. “The slain are really slain,” Max Horkheimer laments, in a rebuttal to the late mystic Walter Benjamin. “Past injustice has occurred and is completed.” In other words, no recourse to law or due diligence will matter to X. X, they told us, was already dead.
*
The West Valley Detention Center lies just one hour east of Los Angeles, off the I-10, a languorous freeway that cuts through the harsher, drier California. From above, it closely resembles other high-security facilities. Its octagonal architecture, perfect in its provision of symmetry, aspires to an image of nature: Is this a hive or is this a detention center? Its symmetry can fool you into thinking detention centers are natural. Its symmetry is an ordinance.
From the street, this perilous geography is transfigured into a big box store. The sheer pomp of its overwatered lawn! Like any correctional facility or conurbation in the vast expanse of American desert, this one shouldn’t be here. The structure assumes its fullest meaning when understood as a repetition—as one among thousands of such federal and state prisons, local jails, and detention centers. Each is a paean to a carceral state so all-encompassing you must squint to discern its reach.
Opened in 1991, just months after George H. W. Bush signed into law the Crime Control Act, West Valley tells of a longer national history of prison expansion and mass criminalization on the one hand, and state divestment of answerability to care for the psychiatrically ill on the other. Disability scholar Liat Ben-Moshe historicizes these mutually reinforcing transformations, noting how the shrinkage of the safety net from the Reagan era to the 1990s, alongside increased federal expansion of the corrections operation, created a trade-off between social services and incarceration. In the wake of the welfare state’s dismantling, institutions for the psychiatrically or developmentally disabled shuttered their doors.
This phenomenon, referred to by sociologists as deinstitutionalization, was not only a result of the new austerity. It was subtended by an ethical imperative. Reeling from Plath’s The Bell Jar (or Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, depending on where you stood), postwar America witnessed a surge in public awareness of the involuntary commitment of mentally ill patients, and of understaffed and overcrowded institutions where conditions were, more often than not, violently repressive. The widespread closure of psychiatric hospitals was accelerated by the invention of drugs that allowed patients to finally self-medicate from home. And yet, argues Ben-Moshe, institutions for those termed psychiatrically or developmentally disabled that closed down in the 1980s reopened in the coming years as prisons. The noncompliant, the unwell, and the irreverent, were recommitted—but to penitentiaries.
Reinstitutionalization, also called transinstitutionalization, tells of an uncanny persistence marked by the asylum's apparent vanishing and the prison’s ascendant power. The American prison could replicate the asylum through its provision of an exclusionary, physical space. But it would administer its own technologies of seclusion, its own forms of racialized, social control. Transinstitutionalization explains why X’s psychosis activated a penal and not a psychotherapeutic course of action, a juridical perspective on danger and not a medical one in spite of her years-long correspondence with a psychiatrist. The historical continuity between the American asylum and the American prison sheds light on a shared and insidious ideal: to sequester a social order from even the suspicion of difference, which may as well stand for danger.
*
In September of that same year, three inmates died in close succession. One was known to be medically ill; all three died under mysterious circumstances. Since 2021, ten inmates have died while in custody at the West Valley Detention Center.
Five years earlier, and following a separate spate of deaths, the Berkeley-based Prison Law Office had filed a class action lawsuit against San Bernardino County, seeking remediation in its jails and claiming a gross deficiency of medical and mental healthcare, especially for inmates with disabilities. The office alleged the use of excessive force by staff members. When they settled the lawsuit in 2018, the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department promised to employ dozens of mental health professionals. Yet, court-appointed monitors have noted no significant change for mentally ill inmates, who continue to file complaints claiming denial of medical care, inmate abuse by prison authorities, and cruel indifference. Further deaths—most recently, in June of 2023—challenge the putative efficacy of reform measures that, in seeking to improve jail operations, subordinate the provision of psychiatric care to the reflex of carceral punishment.
Said otherwise, building psychiatric units and treatment facilities into the prison system expands the prison system. Reforms that address mental health ramify prison operations and reinforce socioeconomic dependency on them. In an essay titled “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” Melanie Klein posits that such attempts at remediation are founded in destructive impulses. Crucially, the entity that engages in destructive activity need only feel that they have attempted repair in order for it to count as such; the destroyed object does not actually have to be repaired in its entirety. This implies that attempted remediation takes the form of a psychic reprieve for the carceral state—a squirreling away of guilt for harm done that works more to neutralize the demand for remediation than to remediate.
Remediation’s constitutive ambivalence is parried by a more radical and rigorous project: prison abolition. “Abolition,” says Black prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “requires that we change one thing, which is everything.” Demanding nothing less than the full closure of prisons and jails, the abolition movement gained momentum in the 1990s, but drew upon earlier demands made by the Black Panther Party. Where reform is meek and complacent, abolition is revolutionary and redistributive. Abolitionists argue that funding should be funneled away from prisons and toward public health initiatives, rather than toward mental health services in prisons.
Instead, fellow prison abolitionist Angela Davis noted in 2003 that “there may be twice as many people suffering from mental illness who are in jails and prisons than there are in all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined.” Critics of the transincarceration thesis point to record incarceration levels as reason alone for what appears, elsewhere, as the displacement of an asylum population onto the penal system. But the provenance of this particular population of inmates is less important than the fact that it exists. As prisoners themselves call for the provision of better mental healthcare, their demands reveal the simple fact of their suffering. And their suffering suggests that the treatment—and mistreatment—of mental pain is already and increasingly a carceral endeavor.
In this profoundly American sense, X’s death by detention was neither strange nor surprising. Because she was brown, it was even less strange; other encounters with the police had preempted this most fatal one. Because her death was one of many, our grief was collective in kind. But the burden of grief is undiminished even by its collective character. Like love, or what James Baldwin said about love, it makes itself felt in the individual.
Remediation’s constitutive ambivalence is parried by a more radical and rigorous project: prison abolition
X’s death forced my grief into new shapes I half anticipated from others, on the news or in protests, who had lost neighbors or children or friends to prisons or police. Grieving X, I was grieving this country, its casual and punishing brutality nearer than ever before. It was as if X’s death had finally quieted a belief I didn’t know I had: that my family and I would be spared the specific horrors other Americans had had to suffer—that we would remain the lucky ones. I was no longer allowed even the suspension of my disbelief.
*
Anthropologist and psychiatrist Ellen Corin calls schizophrenics “foreign bodies in the fabric of culture.” The epithet accords to an otherwise psychologically conscribed identity a political dimension. Here, Corin echoes a more particular claim made much earlier, in Frantz Fanon’s clinical work on schizophrenia[1] in colonial Algeria: “I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization.” In an affront to the psychopathology of his time, the young psychiatrist looked not to organic or lesional bases, but to the “sociogeny” of the subject to understand his mental suffering. Fanon traced madness—here, “absolute depersonalization”—to the forms of social and cultural alienation built into the colonial-racial order. A confrontation with colonial madness required a total restructuring of society, and, as he’d suggest in The Wretched of the Earth, the cleansing pulse of anticolonial violence.
The structural precursors to schizophrenia in today’s America demand attention, even as they remain largely understudied. X was born to two variously deracinated immigrants, neither of whom remained in the U.S. after this happened. In this way, her so-called schizophrenia was never simply a medical fact. Or rather, its fermentation in a biracial family withheld the affective and fiscal boons of their endlessly deferred assimilation feels significant, or, at the very least, correlative. Was X a foreign body in the cultural fabric because she was schizophrenic? Or was X schizophrenic because she was a foreign body?
Like many others who have died or disappeared in the care of the state, X was prone to becoming the enigma of her death. We wondered if her cell had been cold—its lights, fluorescent. We wondered about that watery, unborn child of hers. We wondered how the hemorrhage had happened—saw, in secret, its crimson tendrils unfurling. We wondered what it was like in that concrete vestibule they called a detention center. How it could fold over you like a second skin, reordering the visible world so that you were no longer in it.
In their rivetingly terse account of her detention, staff have blighted the demand for information and accountability. Their unverified suggestion is that X willed her own death—a uniquely paradoxical admission of their total control and total neglect. From this same lens, X’s suicide was an unwieldy bid to end the governance of her body, which was lethal in essence. To do so, she used the only means available to her, forcing this logic to its most annihilatory conclusion.
*
As children, X and I had not yet heard of detention centers. We did not yet know of death’s gaping maw. Blissful because ignorant, we traipsed the shimmering underworld of our lives together—brief and wondrous and tightly woven, like a rope.
Some days we melted from our human skins, shape-shifting. We were twins. We were mermaids. We were rocks. We peered into a looking glass and each saw the other.
We are on a fishing trip now with our fathers, who are brothers. It has taken us a day to arrive at this bend in the river where it is warm and running. X descends into its abyssal green current, and we watch her find its surface again and reemerge.
[1] “Madness” and “schizophrenia/psychosis” are often used interchangeably, though the latter is distinct to a medical vernacular.