Two complementary studies published in JAMA Network Open shed light on the association between incarceration and mortality (Bovell-Ammon et al 1 and Ruch et al 2 ). Bovell-Ammon et al 1 explore the association between incarceration and mortality using cohort data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) from 1979 to 2018. They found that, nationally, exposure to incarceration was associated with a significant increase in mortality among Black participants compared with non-Black participants (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.65; 95% CI, 1.18-2.31). The authors interpret their findings in the context of structural racism, wherein the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans is deeply connected to underlying socioeconomic risk factors. They suggest that incarceration is a key mechanism in life-expectancy differences between Black and other populations, and as such, the prison system, as well as the overexposure of African Americans to it, constitutes a crucial focal point for social and health policy intervention.The research of Ruch et al 2 followed up a cohort of incarcerated youth in Ohio from 2010 to 2017 to investigate how their mortality rates contrast with nonincarcerated peers who were enrolled in Medicaid. They found that the all-cause mortality rate for incarcerated youth was significantly higher than that for Medicaid-enrolled youth (adjusted incidence rate ratio, 5.91; 95% CI, 4.90-7.13), with Black youth more likely to die from homicide, while White youth were more likely to die at higher rates from suicide and drug overdose. An important finding from their study is that previously

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Any serious engagement with the theory of social death must contend with Afro-pessimism. Socio-Legal Studies advances social death as an un-raced and universalizable phenomenon. Lisa Guenther’s Solitary Confinement, is exemplary of this kind of work. In order to construct a phenomenology of race, Guenther attempts to analogize a theory of slavery (social death) with a theory of phenomenology and solitary confinement. Furthermore, Guenther takes up a humanistic reading of Frantz Fanon’s work, as if Fanon was affirming the possibility of a “new humanism” that could restore social life against social death in the post-colonial wake. This essay is an attempt to provide an Afro-pessimist reading of social death; one that engages anti-blackness as a fundamental condition of civil society and provides a close reading of Fanon’s psychopolitics of racial violence.

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