Expansive bodies and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease under mass supervision

Negative health outcomes experienced by individuals and communities impacted by carceral systems have been documented across the social science and public health literature for some time. This research has tended to prioritize the health impact of incarceration, while outcomes associated with the largest system of correctional control, community supervision (e.g. parole and probation), have only recently begun to be examined. These examinations have tended to prioritize structural pathways, deploying a "social determinants of health" framework ubiquitous in public health research and policy making. While a powerful tool in revealing structural violences and understanding population level health disparities, this approach does little in terms of addressing the nuance of individual experience and its implications for health. Understanding the nuance of "experience" requires not only rigorous qualitative data collection, but also frameworks which can help in interpreting this kind of data. In this paper, I argue that an integrated political ecology of bodies framework (PEB 2.0) more usefully explains the health experiences and outcomes of people who live under community supervision (parole and probation). To do so, I use existing epidemiological and biomedical literature to examine the prevalence of COPD among people serving sentences of parole and probation. By using a PEB framework that imagines the production of embodied health and wellbeing as always simultaneously structural, discursive and experiential, this paper demonstrates a more nuanced understanding of people's experiences of negative health outcomes. Furthermore, instead of focusing on incarcerated people, this article addresses a glaring absence in the public health literature by focusing on the health outcomes of people in the largest system of correctional control, community supervision. As such, this paper suggests more productive lines of inquiry not only in public health research, but also in advancing abolitionist praxis.