Restraint

Where does the carceral state end and the welfare state begin?

Over the last decade, a discourse around “care, not cages” has emerged among abolitionists who fight to close jails and prisons. While the sentiment can articulate a demand against ongoing racialized austerity and a vision for a world without carceral punishment, the binary framing of the phrase can also elide an important question: Can the same state that marks certain populations for removal and death be tasked instead with healing and housing them?

There is nothing new about how both the asylum and the prison disappear unwanted people from public spaces. Indeed, today we seem to be on a pendulum swing toward the rebuilding of the asylum. California’s state legislature, with support from Governor Gavin Newsom, has rebranded the state’s forced mental health treatment program, known as conservatorship (equivalent to guardianship elsewhere), as “care.” In 2023, for the first time since its establishment in 1967, the legislature modified the conservatorship law, expanding its definition of “gravely disabled” to target criminalized drug users by including “substance use disorder” as a qualifying condition. This came on the heels of the passage the 2022 Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment (CARE) Act, which requires every county in California to open specialized courts whose explicit aim is to remove houseless people from public space; this occurs under the auspices of offering “treatment” in the form of a court-ordered “care plan” that is also a pipeline to referral for conservatorship.

The conflation of mental illness, houselessness, and criminality runs deep and unchecked. Administered under these terms, “treatment” is enforced compliance with disappearance from public space, and with pharmaceutical and behavior modification regimens that demand docility. Such technologies of compliance include not only medication but also “shelter” (forced upon even people who are housed), the involuntary three-day psychiatric hold (frequently extended to two weeks), the treatment plan (often irrelevant to the subject’s life path), and the spit hood.

The following narrative is based on a psychiatric hold in 2016 in California. It is drawn from memory, in spite of the latter’s fading from psych meds. Countless people experience this every day.

Restraint, comic page 1. Three EMTs pin the narrator to a gurney. The narrator shouts, ‘Get off of me!’ A close-up shows a leather cuff being fastened tightly around a wrist. The narration continues: ‘Soon my other wrist and both ankles were bound in four-point restraint.’

Restraint, comic page 2. An EMT tells the restrained narrator, ‘Ma’am, you need to calm down.’ The narrator believes the EMTs are federal agents taking them to a black site and replies, ‘I’ll never talk you fucking fed!’ The narrator spits on an EMT’s shoe in ‘a helpless act of defiance.’ The EMT orders, ‘Get me a spit hood!’

Restraint, comic page 3. The narrator cries ‘No!’ as an EMT pulls a hood over their head. Their next sound is muffled, then the speech balloon is silent. Hooded and bound at both wrists and ankles, they are loaded into an ambulance. A final overhead panel shows their entire body strapped to the gurney.

Restraint, comic page 4. The ambulance arrives at a hospital. The narrator explains that these were EMTs taking them to a psychiatric ward for an involuntary hold, not federal agents taking them to a black site. The spit hood is removed. ‘Let me go!’ the narrator cries. ‘Try to relax,’ a masked worker replies. Staff hold the narrator’s legs and inject a cocktail of antipsychotics and sedatives.

Restraint, comic page 5. A close-up shows an injection into the narrator’s buttock. The narration explains that people in the psychiatric ward call it ‘bootyjuice.’ ‘I was out.’ The narrator lies unconscious, then dreams of being a hamster trapped in a tube maze with no escape. Drawings show the hamster, twisting tubes, and winding black paths.

Restraint, comic page 6. Days later, the narrator comes to, drooling over a plate of food. A worker says, ‘Here are your meds.’ The narrator’s defiance has gone; they take every medication, believing it is their only way out. After two weeks, they attend court to prove they are recovering sufficiently. Finally released, they walk out carrying a bag: ‘I left with the sun on my face.’ Signed CRS 2024.