Raising the Living Dead

Book excerpt: "Raising the Living Dead is a new history of Puerto Rico's carceral rehabilitation system in the middle decades of the twentieth century that brings to life the interactions of incarcerated people, their wider social networks, and health care professionals. The book addresses key issues in the history of prisons and the histories of medicine and belief, including how prisoners' different racial, class, and cultural identities shaped their incarceration and how professionals living in a colonial society dealt with the challenge of rehabilitating prisoners for citizenship. The main idea of the book is that, in the region, multiple communities of care came together both inside and outside of prisons to imagine and imperfectly enact solution-oriented cultures of rehabilitation. Specifically, Alberto Ortiz Díaz argues that scientific and humanistic approaches to well-being were deliberately fused to raise the "living dead" (an expression that reemerged in the modern Caribbean to refer to prisoners). These reform groups sought to raise incarcerated people physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, and civically. The book is based on deep, original archival research into the Oso Blanco (White Bear) penitentiary in Puerto Rico, yet it situates its study within Puerto Rico's broader carceral archipelago and other Caribbean prisons. The agents of this history include not only physical health professionals, but also their mental health counterparts (psychologists and psychiatrists), social workers, spiritual and religious practitioners, and, of course, the prisoners and their families. By following all these groups and emphasizing the interpersonal exercise of power, Ortiz Díaz is able to tell a story that goes beyond structural and social control debates. Raising the Living Dead is not just about convicts, their immediate interlocutors, and their contexts, however, but about how together these open a window into the history of social uplift projects within the (neo)colonial societies of the Caribbean. There is no book like this in Caribbean historiography and few examine these themes in the larger literature on the history of prisons"--