Schalk notes that we should not merely read the connections drawn by the Black Panther newspaper and articles between prisons and psychiatric facilities as oppression analogies and rather, it is important to see that the Panthers understood race, disability, prisons, and psychiatric institutions as inextricably linked - this is also why we see less language around these intuitions being ableist and more around them being generally oppressive.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Similar to the usage of the prison industrial complex as a term used to describe the privatization of prisons in the United States and how prisons get monetary benefit from people being incarcerated so they don't have a monetary incentive to actually decrease re-incarceration and have more of a monetary incentive to keep people in prison. The psychiatric industrial complex is a term used to describe how psychiatry creates a space that derives monetary benefit off of having being confined in psychiatric institutions or people continuously needing to access psychiatric care to get medication.

The Psychiatric Industrial Complex

1) "Vacaville - America's Headquarters for Medical Genocide"
2) January 24, 1976 Letter to the Editor
3) May 1, 1976 Letter to the Editor

Examples of how the BPP made Ideological Connections between Prisons and Mental Institutions

Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027003

Black Disability Politics

Anderson's letter to the editor made the connections between psychiatric and criminal institutions more explicit by noting that the only reason why state hospitals don't need gun towers overseeing the yard is because they have staff firing psychotropic medication.

Rayford Anderson August 7, 1976 Letter to the Editor

In the cases of the Vacaville article and Crockett's Letters to the Editor we can see curative violence being enacted through forced medication without regard to how future medication may impact an inmate's ability to stand trial.

 Psychiatric Industrial Complex and Curative Violence

"Vacaville - American Headquarters for Medical Genocide" was a story published in the Black Panther newspaper in June 26, 1971 which detailed the medical and legal abuses that occurred at the Vacaville Medical Center which was a part of the California state prison system. This article brought to light the drug and dosage experiments being performed on Vacaville patients that often had disabling effects. The individuals held at Vacaville were placed there because they were considered discipline problems at other penal institutions. The article in the Black Panther newspaper argued that drug testing was used as a means of control against activists who protest the oppression they face both inside and outside incarcertation.

"Vacaville - American Headquarters for Medical Genocide"

In 1976, the Black Panther published several letters to the editor that provided direct statements from Black individuals being held in psychiatric institutions. During 1976, the Black Panther also published two articles providing state and federal legal context for the claims of those being held in psychiatric institutions. One of the two context articles explains a proposed California state bill that would mandate the right to refuse psychiatric medication, psychosurgery and other "psycho-organic procedures." The other article reported on the congressional National Commission for the Protection of Human Biomedical Behavioral Research's decision that allowed the continued use of psychosurgery as an experimental research procedure.

These articles represent the BPP awareness and promotion of political anti-psychiatry work on the macro-level, along with Mad pride and other consumer/survivor/ex-patient movements that attended to the microlevel experiences of individuals.

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