Public Emergency Room Overcrowding in the Era of Mass Imprisonment

Sociology of Emergency Rooms

Medical sociology’s study of how resources are distributed to patients is closely related to the labeling and categorization of patients, their illnesses, and their moral worth (Dobransky 2011). Like their counterparts in other human service organizations, medical professionals use discretion in carrying out the daily work of medicine (Lipsky 1980; Prottas 1979; Schwartz 1972). Medical tenets, which purport objectivity and the absence of bias, sit alongside wider cultural beliefs about patients that inform practices often unacknowledged by medical professionals (Chiarello 2013; George and Dundes 1978; Heimer and Staffen 1995; Timmermans 1998; Waitzkin 1989).

Roth (1972) and Jeffery (1979) extended this discussion to the public ER and prompted a number of sociological studies (e.g., Hinze et al. 2009; Kurz 1987; Lincoln 2006; Mizrahi 1985; Vassey 2001). These scholars document three findings relevant for this article. First, the designation of “undeserving” patients is linked to wider prejudices about poverty, dependency on welfare, and race (Lincoln 2006; Roth 1972; Schwartz 1972). Medical professionals use cues given during clinical encounters to make presumptions about their patients’ social status (Roth 1972). These studies, conducted in the 1970s, found that in contrast to stigma about poverty and welfare, criminal stigma was reserved for a small subset of the patient population. Medical staff assigned criminal stigma only to arrestees and to patients who presented to the ER for drug overdose (Jeffery 1979; Roth 1972).

Second, ER staff value patients they consider “urgent” (with more critical medical conditions) and strongly disfavor “non-urgent” patients (who, presumably, can be treated in outpatient settings) (Jeffery 1979; Mannon 1976; Mizrahi 1985; Roth 1972; Schwartz 1972; Vassey 2001). Professionals believe the categories of urgent and non-urgent are well specified and rationally demarcated. Indeed, medical journals are replete with attempts to understand the motivations of non-urgent patients who supposedly choose to use the ER as a source of primary care (see Durand et al. 2011; Krug 1999). In these studies, casting non-urgent patients as inappropriate candidates for emergency care is crucial to how medical professionals make sense of their patients and overcrowding.

Third, these studies underspecify the mechanisms by which stigma about patients actually delays ER admission. Roth (1972) focuses on use of aggressive verbal commands against stigmatized patients. He leaves unclear, however, whether such patients receive the care they seek in spite of their often harsh treatment. Jeffery (1979) describes how staff delay the treatment of “undeserving” patients, but he provides evidence only for alcoholics sent to back rooms (to be dealt with when staff members have the time) and non-urgent patients sent to separate waiting rooms. Jeffery notes that when crowding increases, some urgent patients are pushed to these separate waiting rooms, but he says nothing about how this blurring unfolds. Vassey (2001) studies how staff’s labels affect patients throughout an ER visit. Patients are subject to delays in x-rays, delays in transfer to inpatient wards, and other less visible instances of feet dragging. However, the exact mechanisms by which stigma affects the admissions process remain underspecified.

Sociology of Imprisonment, Policing, and Crime Control Language

Criminologists and scholars studying the social control of the urban poor document three trends relevant to this inquiry: a dramatic rise in incarceration rates, intensification of policing, and a proliferation of crime control language. First, since the 1970s, the adult incarceration rate jumped from 100 people per 100,000 to its current rate in excess of 700 people per 100,000 (Western and Pettit 2010). This is a larger rate than any other country in the world. Among other factors, deindustrialization, the breakdown of informal social controls, stricter sentencing, the criminalization of narcotics, and the enlargement of prison capacity and law enforcement budgets contributed to this growth (Bertram et al. 1996; Western 2006).

Some characterize this dramatic growth as “mass imprisonment” insofar as the incarceration rate is now high enough and concentrated enough to affect an entire demographic group (Garland 2001): a large proportion of the incarcerated are poor, are people of color (Western 2006), and come from concentrated urban areas (Clear 2007). As Clear (2007:9–10) writes, “The ubiquity of prison touches almost everybody in these neighborhoods. Every family has a member with limited labor market options; every family knows someone struggling to stay out of jail, many mothers are raising children whose fathers have a prison record” (see also Comfort 2008). Research has focused on returning inmates’ diminished social status and its effect on a host of individual- and community-level outcomes, including, but not limited to, access to public aid (Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002), voting (Manza and Uggen 2006), employment (Pager 2008), parenting and children (Wakefield and Wildeman 2014), education (Hagan and Foster 2012), health (Schnittker et al. 2011), and inequality (Western 2006).

Second, scholars have documented the intensification of policing in these neighborhoods (Goffman 2009; Rios 2011). Goffman (2009) describes a vast network of post-incarceration policing, surveillance, and intimidation that shapes the practices and lived experience of the urban poor. Young men and their partners live in a state of generalized fear and mistrust—even reporting reluctance to visit hospitals for fear of re-arrest. Rios (2011) documents that, even before their first arrest, young black and Latino boys are subject to police scrutiny—regardless of whether they have committed crimes. Moreover, increased police presence and surveillance have been documented in urban public schools (Hirschfield 2008; Kupchik 2012) and welfare institutions (Gustafson 2011). Regarding the latter, Gustafson (2011) reports that recipients’ names are routinely shared with law enforcement, and public aid offices have been used as sites for sting operations.

Finally, scholars have documented the proliferation of crime control language and criminal stigma as transforming a variety of laws, policies, public and private institutions, and the everyday practices of policymakers and citizens (Garland 2002; Muhammad 2010; Simon 2007; Soss et al. 2011; Wacquant 2009). Simon (2007:4) articulates three aspects of this proliferation: (1) citizens are now legitimized when they act to prevent behaviors viewed as criminal; (2) crime control is used as legitimizing motivation for many non-criminal policy interventions; and (3) “the technologies, discourses, and metaphors of crime and criminal justice” reshape how policymakers and citizens view a plethora of social problems. Indeed, Garland (2002:201) writes that welfare and criminal justice institutions “share the same assumptions, harbor the same anxieties, deploy the same stereotypes, and utilize the same recipe for the identification of risk and the allocation of blame.” For their part, Hays (2004) and Soss and colleagues (2011) emphasize the use of punitive sanctions in the welfare system, including the use of drug testing and criminal records to exclude clients. The expansion of incarceration, policing, and crime control language in the lives of the urban poor—the primary users of public ERs—all point to the necessity of this inquiry.

The Rational System of Triage and the Harrowing Wait

In the ERs of the 1970s studied by Schwartz (1972), Roth (1972), Prottas (1979), and Jeffery (1979), non-medical clerks were in charge of admission decisions. The rules for vetting incoming patients were unspecific, learned on the job, and applied inconsistently. In the contemporary ER, registered nurses and nurse practitioners now conduct triage when admitting patients. This professionalization contributes to the purported objectivity and rationality of the admission process. ⁴

When patients first enter the ER, they pass through a security checkpoint (with x-ray machines and metal detectors) and are directed to an initial screening room. This screening room contains 3 to 10 interview booths (depending on staffing). Patients typically wait an hour to be called to a booth. The room is tense, as patients are told very little about the admissions process: every few minutes, security guards wrangle with weary patients who demand to be informed of their fate.

Eventually, nurses call each patient to a booth, conduct oral interviews, and administer vital signs checks. In these interviews, nurses push for specific symptoms and the reasons patients chose to seek care on that particular day. Patients, however, often annoy nurses with the wider social circumstances of their pain (e.g., lack of housing, unemployment, and stress) and more general health problems. Finally, vital signs checks (blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature measures) are given to patients. The vital signs tests are a key source of triage’s purported objectivity:

“It’s how we know whether or not a patient is faking, if they are really in pain,” said one hospital administrator, “it also allows us to differentiate between patients with the same presenting medical issues. If one has a heart rate over 200 and another one with 195 we can make a distinction. The machine does not lie.”

These oral interviews and the vital signs checks constitute the rational rules that guide nurses in assigning urgency rankings.

Assigning patients urgency rankings (A, B, C, or D) is the critical goal of these interviews. The order patients are to be admitted is based on their ranking; the sickest should always receive beds first. Most patients are given a ranking of B (urgent) or C (non-urgent) and sent to two different waiting rooms. The C-list patients, who constitute the vast majority, are sent to the front room lobby where they are placed on the “general wait list.” These patients are to be admitted based on their order of arrival.

The front room waiting lobby—where C-list patients wait—is an unpredictable setting. At times, patients sleep and patiently await their admission. At other times, it is a chaotic space with police officers threatening the removal of patients and confrontations between frustrated patients and nurses. Patients normally line the walls and sit on the floor; however, the room becomes noticeably overcrowded when new patients are only able to stand in walkways and obstruct nurse traffic. The bathroom always has a long line. Children are a constant source of noise. For most patients, the 8- to 18-hour wait is harrowing.

Critical to the fate of C-list patients is the process of “reassessment.” Reassessment refers to re-checks of patients’ vital signs during the wait. The goal is to monitor changing conditions and upgrade or downgrade patients’ rankings accordingly. Reassessment is particularly important because nurses have the discretion to expunge patients from the wait list if they do not respond when called for reassessment. This process results in the expulsion of many C-list patients.

Patients given B rankings are considered “urgent” and are sent to a separate waiting room called the “observation waiting room.” To gain access to this room, patients pass through a separate security checkpoint. In the observation waiting room, head nurses deliberate over patients who are near the point of admission. This separate waiting room allows nurses to maintain continual observation of B-list patients as they wait. Because these patients are considered more urgent than their C-list counterparts, they are, technically, always to be admitted before C-list patients—regardless of arrival time.

It is in this observation room that the head nurse makes final admissions decisions. When beds become available, the nurse gets a phone call from a bed coordinator with information on how many beds are free. During such moments, many head nurses claim to remember all patients and the seriousness of their conditions. The information is built up from reviewing records, their own observations, and conversations with other staff. Once a decision is made, patients are called and, if they have not left in the interim, led to a bed.

There is also a “back room” entrance to the ER. This entrance is available for patients brought by ambulance, fire departments, police departments, and sheriffs from local jails. This entrance has a separate nurse whose primary responsibility is to negotiate access to beds for these public safety arrivals. It has a small waiting lobby where there is almost always a congregation of public safety officers. Nurses befriend these officers after repeated interactions, and it is a collegial setting. It is also a gauntlet of sorts for incoming arrestees and inmates, who are often taunted and questioned about criminal activity.

Two Conundrums of Overcrowding

Triage staff must find solutions to two organizational conundrums created by extreme overcrowding. The first is the rule that B-list patients (more urgent patients) should always receive beds before C-list patients. A problem emerges when, because so many B-list worthy patients arrive to the ER, the B-list is never empty. Therefore, technically, in these cases, no one on the C-list should ever receive a bed. If staff do not find informal means of thinning the C-list, the general lobby will swell even further and the hospital risks losing accreditation. ⁵

The second conundrum is that there are more B-list patients whom triage guidelines categorize as urgent and in need of a bed than there are available beds. That is, nurses must choose between patients who, according to medical criteria, equally qualify for beds. This constitutes insufficient specificity in the conferral of “urgent” rankings (Prottas 1979). For example, a head nurse is told that two beds are now open, but the nurse previously determined that three patients were all equally in need of beds. Over the course of their approximately eight-hour wait, all three patients had at least one concerning EKG (a diagnostic tool that measures the electrical rhythms of the heart), some shortness of breath, intermittent chest tightness, and high pulse rates. A head nurse said in such a situation,

These patients . . . are most likely not going to have a heart attack during their time at this hospital. But, you never know, and it only takes one patient to die here in the waiting room to spark a lawsuit. From my perspective, with the information I have on them and what they have provided me with, they all have an equal chance, albeit a small chance, of that happening.

The nurse is faced with a conundrum: Which two patients get a bed and which patient will continue to wait?

What is at stake when a bed is given to one patient over another? Those who are made to wait are more likely to leave the ER before being seen by a physician (National Public Health and Hospital Institute 2011). Although available data show no medical differences between those who leave and those who continue to wait, patients who leave are far more likely to develop serious medical problems in the short term (Baker, Stevens, and Brook 1991). The consequences for long-term health are unknown. While the medical community is at a loss for why some patients “choose” to leave the ER (Arendt et al. 2003), in what follows, I show that patients often leave because of dynamics related to crime control and criminal justice.

Delaying General Patients: Pain Medication and the Expansion of Criminal Stigma

Previous studies of pain medication document how people from low social-status groups are less likely to be prescribed pain medication at the point of hospital discharge (Hinze et al. 2009; Todd et al. 2000). In stark contrast stands the world of triage, where pain medication is ubiquitous and plays a central role in managing the front room waiting list patients. During the course of the wait, many patients are administered heavy opiate analgesics.

The widespread administration of pain medication allows staff to manage overcrowding in two ways. First, pain medication temporarily alters waiting patients’ vital signs (the primary means by which triage staff identify the sickest patients) and thus provides nurses with valid medical reasons for selectively delaying the admission of some patients over others. After receiving pain medication (which temporarily makes patients feel better), some patients leave the ER—an outcome that shrinks the wait list. Second, administration of pain medication creates the potential for triage staff to invoke the stigma of narcotics addiction and criminality about any patient. Triage staff rationalize delays by explaining that some who seek care do so only to obtain narcotics. Thus, the act of seeking health care in the front room entrance is understood as an act of criminality.

The following excerpt describes an event that took place in the observation room and illustrates the processes whereby a patient, on the verge of obtaining a bed because he has significant indicators of chest pain, was moved from urgent to non-urgent. Triage guidelines at this hospital dictate that rapidly changing blood pressure, high heart rates, and suspicious EKGs should be upgraded.

“Yeah, it is true. He fits the criteria for a bed if that’s what you’re asking,” Arthur, the head nurse, said to me after I asked him about a patient who had just been complaining about his wait time. “But what that guy doesn’t understand is that we gave him pain medication. And he’s been here for what . . . [looking at the computer screen] six hours. He got reassessed and his vitals have changed, he can wait awhile longer at this point. . . . The pain meds are doing what they are supposed to do.”

At that point, the patient came back up to Arthur and, while touching Arthur’s forearm, said, “If I die here, it’s your fault.” Arthur, aghast, looked down at his arm and said, “Sir, you need to take your arm off of me right now, I will have the sheriffs come down here and remove you.” The patient walked away.

Several hours later and after two rounds of bed openings had passed, Arthur called the patient for a re-check of his vital signs. He was nowhere to be found. It was clear he was one of the many patients that left the ER prematurely. “HA!” said Arthur.

I shot Arthur a perplexed look and said, “What? He wasn’t as serious as he claimed?”

Arthur replied, “Well [pause] . . . he definitely needed a bed at some point. I had him on-deck for about four rounds [nurses’ word for instances when beds became available]. He had a concerning EKG, the other one was okay after, and his sweating and heart rate were a bit high before the pain meds, so he meets the criteria . . . but . . .” Sensing Arthur was reluctant to elaborate I said, “It must be tough, there are a few people on this list just like him, right?”

With almost seamless transition, he said, “Yeah. And the thing is . . . this guy has been here a bunch. You saw that from his record. He’s got problems and can’t take care of himself: eat right, exercise, and go to the damn clinic. Blaming me if you die here? It’s your fault for not putting in the time to get it looked at. I mean, look, he took off . . . probably was here just to get the drugs.”

Although many patients leave the ER after receiving pain medication, many others continue to wait, and this necessitates another way of ignoring qualifications for admission. In the example above, in addition to administering pain medication, the nurse cast this patient as a part of the undeserving poor. The patient is worthy of delay because Arthur depicts him as not having done anything to fix his health problems, which Arthur surmises from the patient’s purported unnecessary use of the ER and blaming of Arthur for his predicament. This stigmatization is buttressed by threats of arrest, ambiguous use of the word “record,” and presumed drug addiction. Immediately after the exchange, I asked Arthur to elaborate on his indictment of the patient as a drug addict:

Arthur replied, “The thing you have to understand: we have a bunch of drug users and drug-pushers in here. Half the time these people are complaining and are in here for these simple issues, they are just here for the free supply.”

The application of criminal stigma to patients post hoc obscures the true function of pain medication in the ER. To be clear, qualified patients are delayed and deterred from accessing health care through the use of pain medication, and this delaying and deterrence is justified through the use of crime control language.

In Roth’s (1972) and Jeffery’s (1979) ethnographies of public ERs in the 1970s, criminal stigma was reserved for a small subset of patients: those brought to the ER for drug overdose or brought by police. In the contemporary ER, as documented here, pain medication creates the potential to indict all patients as drug addicts, regardless of their relationship to police or actual criminal drug use, and therefore undeserving of care. The rhetoric and narratives around drug peddling and addiction—which are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary crime control language (Simon 2007)—inform triage staff’s shared understanding of their patient population and justifications for continuous delays.

Delays across Race and Gender: Deploying Criminal Stigma and Missing Medical Information

The previous section described how criminal stigma is applied to general patients on the front room wait list (via the administration of pain medication); I now describe how triage staff put such an understanding to work in selecting some patients over others for beds. Specifically, I demonstrate that triage staff utilize criminal stigma to solve the critical problem of “missing medical information.” As we will see, deployment of this criminal stigma occurs along race and gender lines.

Because staff have limited access to in-depth medical tests and time, they are faced with much “missing medical information” about the patients they are trying to rank. As a result, they often use discretion to admit patients on the “hunch” that missing medical information would confirm an urgent ranking. This use of discretion is, in part, informed by criminal stigma about patients. ⁸ As an illustration, the following excerpt details how one woman moved from a less urgent ranking to immediately admissible:

A young woman approached the nursing booth and asked the head nurse, named Melinda, how much longer she would have to wait. Melinda gave her standard response, “I’m sorry ma’am, I know you have been waiting a while, but you’re going to have to continue to wait; we try to give beds to the sickest patients.”

As the patient walked away, Frank, another nurse, whispered to Melinda, “Yeah, her vitals are pretty good. . . . I just reassessed her maybe an hour or two ago.” “Hmmm,” Melinda responded. “She can’t be faking that, her eyes are so blood red . . . she looks miserable, but when you look at her vitals they are perfect.” I see Melinda slowly going over the computer and pondering the patient’s record. “Let’s look at her labs,” she says, “I don’t know, can’t really upgrade her if she isn’t indicating anything. It’s weird, I don’t think I’ve seen her here before.”

At this point, Melinda, the head nurse, was unwilling to admit this patient despite the disconnect between visual cues of pain (the red eyes) and normal vital/lab results. Melinda referenced criminal stigma when she explained the delay with the phrase, “It’s weird, I don’t think I’ve seen her before.” In the culture of the triage staff, this phrase invokes the baseline assumption that most waiting patients fake illnesses to return to the ER and obtain narcotics. Although most patients have some kind of missing medical information, patients who can dissociate themselves from criminal stigma are admitted on “hunches” that missing information constitutes an urgent health problem. Several hours later this same patient asked Melinda if she could go outside:

“What for? You really shouldn’t go outside if your situation is serious . . .” responded Melinda. “Solemente quieria hablar con mi esposo [I only wanted to talk to my husband],” the woman said. Melinda, with a surprised look on her face said, “Your husband is waiting for you out there?” After the patient said yes, Melinda told another nurse to go find the husband and bring him to the waiting room. . . . As the man walked in, with painter trousers on, he immediately struck me as one of the many immigrant construction workers in the area. Melinda leaned toward me so as to hide her comment, “I didn’t know she was married and that he was waiting out there for her this whole time . . . that’s so cute . . . [as the woman leans on her husband’s shoulder] . . . he really cares about her. . . . I’m pretty sure something must be up cause he wouldn’t be waiting if he’s got work tomorrow . . . [after a short pause] . . . something must really be wrong.”

A short while later, two beds opened up and the patient was admitted above six other people. I said to Melinda, “How did you know she wasn’t faking the pain? Her vitals were good right?”

“Yeah, it’s true, but I mean you saw her right, she looked miserable and when we can’t really tell if something is going on, that doesn’t mean something ISN’T going on. And the thing is you don’t really fake when the family waits for you like that. I asked them and he was in construction and he does have to work tomorrow. Because I told them that they would be here through the night and they stayed anyways. HE stayed with her . . . so you know . . .”

In this example, the head nurse moved from being willing to ignore the missing information to admitting this patient on a hunch. This move was made possible once the patient was able to demonstrate her romantic relationship with someone who was perceived to earn a living from non-criminal endeavors.

This excerpt points to how criminal stigma (or, in this case, the absence thereof ) is deployed according to the intersection of race and gender. Publicly, the ER is a color-blind environment. While medical professionals are willing to verbalize stigma around criminality and welfare-dependency, they are absolutely unwilling to verbalize stigma about race and gender. Yet, over the course of my fieldwork, it became clear that ethnicity and gender mediate how some patients come to be associated or disassociated with criminal stigma in two main ways.

First, ethnicity is critical in determining how women’s relationship status associates them with criminal stigma. Specifically, when Latinas indicate that they are in relationships with Latino men (who triage staff largely consider to be involved in non-criminal employment), triage staff are more willing to pursue missing medical information for such patients. In stark contrast stands the assessment of African American women. When African American women associate themselves with African American men, triage staff are likely to assume such partnerships exist only to support illegal economic activity (e.g., prostitution or drug use) and are thus less likely to admit such patients on hunches. These assumptions draw on broader stereotypes of African American women (Collins 2000) and specific stereotypes of black men as criminals (Anderson 2012). This also suggests the strategic deployment of Latinos as a “model minority” (Wortham, Mortimer, and Allard 2009).

Second, the presence of children and associated gender roles mediates men’s and women’s relationship to criminal stigma. When women present to the emergency room with children, triage staff often assume the children were reared, in part, to increase access to public aid, and, by extension, the ER’s opioids. The staff’s willingness to fill in missing information for such patients is much lower. Yet, when adult men present to the ER with children, triage staff are more likely to assume they are “good fathers” and unassociated with criminality. In other words, for women, children are a sign of welfare dependence (and, by extension, ER abuse), whereas for men, children provide protection against criminal stigma. These gendered deployments of criminal stigma in the ER reflect how women’s relationships to men and children are reconstructed by state actors in frontline institutions (Haney 1996).

Police Patrols and Expelling General Patients in the Front Room

During the past decade, the number of official police units stationed at public hospitals has been on the rise (to be clear, I refer only to official police units, not private security guards). After remaining relatively stable throughout the 1990s, police forces devoted to patrolling public medical facilities jumped from 42 in 2000 to 64 in 2008, and the amount of sworn officers in those forces increased from 978 to 1,460. ⁹ This number is not insignificant considering that the number of general acute care public hospitals in the 100 largest U.S. cities recently fell to just 70 (Andrulis and Duchon 2007). A common misconception among doctors in this ER is that the full-time police unit stationed at the hospital simply protects medical staff from angry patients and kicks out individuals who attempt to spend the night in the lobby. Far more important is police officers’ role in systematically thinning the front room wait list of general patients.

When the waiting lobby becomes particularly overcrowded—that is, there are no more seats for new patients—the police unit begins, one by one, checking the IDs of each person waiting in the lobby and occasionally reading those names into walkie talkies. These names are read so that officers at remote computers can conduct background checks. On many occasions, I observed waiting patients who, after seeing this activity occurring on one end of the lobby, preemptively left the ER. Field interviews with such ex-patients indicate they left the ER because they did not want the police to discover some arrestable status (i.e., an outstanding warrant, probation violation, or status as an undocumented immigrant). This pressure to stop seeking health care is consistent with Goffman’s (2009) finding that young men “on the run” avoid public institutions for fear of re-arrest; it also aligns with work on undocumented immigrants’ fear of local deportations (Berk and Schur 2001). However, this policing also affects people who have little connection with criminal or undocumented statuses; that is, members of the general public are also pressured to stop seeking health care in the front room entrance. To understand this important point, it is vital to understand the connection between reassessment and policing.

As previously described, reassessment is the process by which nurses are mandated to re-check waiting patients’ vital signs at regular intervals. Hospital policy dictates that if patients do not respond when their names are called for reassessment two or more times, they can be removed from the waiting list. If patients return after missing their name call, they can be forced to re-register and start the waiting process over again. Nursing staff consider this job the least desirable because it rarely results in upgrading of patients’ conditions and usually leads to confrontations with frustrated patients.

When nurses are in charge of reassessment, they are reluctant to expunge patients from the waiting list. Depending on whether a patient has been given a good moral evaluation, nurses will strike a patient from the list after two, three, or four chances. Moreover, nurses will go out of their way to look for patients in the bathrooms, hallways, or even outside the hospital before expunging a patient.

Police buttress the link between reassessment and expulsion in the following two ways. First, they use policing tactics to pressure individuals to actually leave the ER when nurses remove them from the wait list. Absent such tactics, patients can sometimes plead their way back onto the waiting list when dealing directly with nurses. Second, when overcrowding reaches critical levels and the waiting list swells, police take over the work of reassessment directly. During such instances, a police unit calls out the names of every C-list patient waiting in the front room lobby. When police are in charge of calling out names, reassessments occur more frequently. The calls are made from one location and take about five seconds to read each name three times. Patients inevitably miss their call. Police see buttressing the effectiveness of reassessment as one of the primary ways they “keep the waiting line in check,” as one officer described it to me:

Sometimes the nurses give them a little leeway. We just make sure it happens. . . . These people need to be in this room if they are really sick . . . if they are off, out of the ER, god knows what they are up to.

If the nurses do this a lot of times the people will come crawling back and start hassling them. . . . Saying they were here the whole time. But if we do it, the people are gonna be less likely to challenge what we say. . . . Lots of times if the person is really challenging us, we will just get on the radio and call the guys down [other officers]. We can just surround the suspect, stare him down, pressure, and they will remove themselves. We know how to deal with people that are disrespectful, that’s what we do for a living.

Another officer described his role as follows:

The hospital has rules about the waiting list. The list would just be endless if we didn’t do this. These people come in here week after week, everybody knows they don’t really need to be here. And the conditions, the overcrowding in here, can be dangerous, people lose their cool. And these types of people, this is just a fact I’m not trying to be a dick, crime is always going to be an issue. You have drug peddlers in here. So it helps with safety as well. If we didn’t enforce these rules or like make them actually work, these people would really be able to abuse the waiting list.

Two key points stand out from these excerpts. First, police justify their role in expunging general patients by utilizing the same understanding of patients as the nurses: the criminalized patient. When the police officer says, “if they are off, out of the ER, god knows what they are up to,” he is demonstrating the shared idea that some patients are not really sick and are perpetrating crime. Patients, who in this context have nothing to do with the criminal justice system, are redefined as suspects. When these patient-suspects attempt to pressure police for re-enlistment onto the waiting list, the police respond with arrest tactics to ensure expulsion. When threatened with arrest, jailing, and a criminal record, even the most resilient patients leave the public ER. Second, the officers conjoin their traditional roles of ensuring public safety with the mandate to solve the organizational conundrums of overcrowding. When the officer prefaces his crime control statement with, “the hospital has rules about the waiting list. The list would just be endless if we didn’t do this,” he indicates his understanding that policing works, in part, to solve overcrowding problems in the front room waiting lobby.

Rushing Health Care to Inmates and Arrestees

The frequency with which police and jailers bring arrestees, inmates, suspects, and witnesses to the back room entrance of the ER significantly affects the front room waiting line. Arrestees and inmates who arrive in the back room entrance are provided with beds before general patients in the front room—often despite having non-urgent medical conditions. This is a counter-intuitive finding, as previous research suggests the “mark” of the criminal justice system precludes the provision of services (Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002). Instead, nurses justify favoring police and jail arrivals because they believe the escorting public safety officials cannot be made to wait the 12 or more hours that would be standard for such non-urgent patients. In contrast, when fire departments and ambulance officials bring patients through the back room entrance, they simply drop them off into the front room and these patients enter the normal triage process. Police and jailers, however, cannot relinquish custody of patients they bring to the ER.

During the 1990s, the frequency of police and jail arrivals to this ER began to exceed the amount of space reserved for inmates. The 15 to 20 beds in this ER’s jail ward—the beds in the ER specifically devoted to in-custody patients—are perpetually filled. Discussion with officers in the back room entrance of this ER revealed that police bring individuals to the hospital for two general reasons. First, public safety officials are legally obligated to provide treatment for “serious illness or injury” suffered during custody (Sundararajan et al. 2012). Second, as documented here, police bring arrestees, suspects, and witnesses to the ER to interrogate them. ¹⁰ The following excerpt captures the admission of a police arrival. It is an important example because it illustrates both police understandings of their reasons for bringing the arrestee into the ER and the nurse’s reasons for favoring the patient:

Two police officers were talking with a young man strapped and handcuffed to a gurney, kind of joking with him in a way. “You make good money. I know you have a better load than I do,” said the police officer to the man. “We know you’re hustling, we seen you on that corner before, don’t lie.”

At this, I assumed the man was one of many brought here for possession of narcotics. He struck me as aloof in a way that instantly made me think he was high on drugs, and I could tell the officers were trying to get him to admit to selling . . . which carries a much stiffer sentence.

“We gotta get you off the streets man . . . you keep hurtin’ people, your family . . . let’s just take you out of there . . .” said the other officer to the man.

After a brief silence (I was very scared to say anything), I managed to ask: “Why is he here, guys?”

The policeman looked up at me in surprise, looked over to the back room charge nurse, who nodded to him, and then said, “He’s here ’cause he’s high, I mean he’s drunk too, so I doubt anything is wrong with him per se . . . we just HAVE to take him here.”

“So it’s like, what, protocol to bring him down here?” I asked.

“Well it’s not so much that, I mean that’s true, but that is kind of up to our judgment. A lot of these guys are high when we take them in, you know like we can pretty much find stuff people are doing illegal just by talking to them . . . and we’re trying to crackdown on that area.”

Shortly after this conversation, a nurse escorted the police officers to a bed where they would sit with the man for the next few hours. As soon as they left, I walked over to the back room charge nurse to ask him about the admission, “So do the cops ever have to like wait around a bunch? It’s kind of surprising a bed was open so quickly . . . right?” The nurse replied,

Look, there is a reason they have a charge nurse back here in the ambulance entrance and one in the front . . . these cops are coming in all the time with drug guys, sometimes the alcoholics, but mainly the drugs. I have a relationship with those guys, a working relationship. I know what they go through. It’s hard out there. It’s a courtesy to them. . . . I mean legally they can’t just drop that guy off here, ’cause normally if that guy walked through the doors, right, he would be waiting a LONG time. There’s no way we can have those cops waiting in the ER for 12 hours when they know nothing’s wrong with the guy . . . it would basically kill the police . . . it’s just a thing they have to do.

The institutional preference for policing often comes into conflict with the goals of the front room triage staff. On many occasions, head nurses in the front room complained to me about patients whose ailments were so common that had they walked through the front door they would simply be told to wait. As one front room nurse told me,

We give the patients the cops bring in priority, I mean it’s good because it helps [the cops] out, they are doing a job for the city, but I mean, in a way it kind of backs us up here. The people they bring in aren’t really sick, they wouldn’t qualify in any situation for the type of fast admission they get.

It is important to point out that triage staff are ambivalent in how they view the rushing of inmates and arrestees. While nurses express reluctance about the preference for police and their wards, they also accept public safety arrivals because they maintain professional relationships with public safety staff. Ultimately, general patients in the front room lose beds to the endless supply of arrestees and inmates. The loss of beds occurs in a context in which, as described earlier, longer waits put pressure on the 21 percent of patients who leave the ER before being seen by a physician.

Consequences for Population Health

The dual effects of crime control trends on the public ER are consequential for understanding the population health of the urban poor. First, the idea that the urban poor have more access to health care if they are incarcerated expands on Comfort’s (2007:271) contention that prison is becoming a “primary distributor of social services to the poor.” In the context of a diminished welfare state, America’s vast prison system may be the urban poor’s only source of what Comfort (2007:286) calls “carceralized aid”—access to health care, food, shelter, childcare, and other meager services offered in custody settings. In relation to health care, this contention is supported by incarcerations’ unexpected improvement of the mortality of incarcerated black men; that is, compared to their peers outside of prison, incarcerated black men are less likely to die. Patterson (2010) contends that while the protective effects of imprisonment (protection from homicide or car accidents) explain some of incarceration’s effect on mortality, mandated in-custody health care offered to inmates also produces incarceration’s positive effect on health (see also the discussion in Wildeman 2011). This development is possible both because state criminal justice spending is negatively associated with state health/welfare spending (Beckett and Western 2001; Ellwood and Guetzkow 2009) and because inmates have little access to health care outside of prison and often resume treatments once they enter into custody settings (Wilper et al. 2009). The rushing effects studied here suggest that the dynamics of public health care organizations also help explain inmates’ increased protection against death.

Second, these findings corroborate and expand on the idea that, outside of prison, ex-inmates are less likely to access public institutions. Brayne (2014) uses nationally representative data to show that formerly incarcerated individuals are much less likely to utilize what she calls “surveilling institutions”—institutions, like hospitals, that tend to record information about their clients. Goffman (2009) elucidates ex-inmates’ perspectives on this avoidance, documenting that they fear being re-arrested in hospitals. This study expands on these findings by showing that ex-inmates (and undocumented persons) fear hospitals for good reason: the public ER is a site of police patrols, and ERs systematically rely on such patrols to solve their overcrowding problems. These findings may contribute, in part, to trends in population health: ex-inmates have far higher rates of mortality, communicable diseases, and disability and, in general, have poor long-term health (Massoglia 2008; Schnittker and John 2007; Wildeman 2011).

Third, by taking a broader view of crime control trends—not simply incarceration or policing, but also expanded crime control language among health care professionals—this research is the first to document an organizational explanation for crime control’s additive effect on access to health care for the urban poor who have no criminal justice contact. When the urban poor seek care in the public ER, regardless of their criminal status, they will find fewer beds available to them and simultaneously face delays, policing, and deterrence from accessing health care. Moreover, their medical diagnosis and chances of gaining admission will, in part, be shaped by crime control language that is pervasive among health care workers.

Note that the urban poor who have no direct criminal justice contact may have indirect contact through familial relationships with inmates or ex-inmates. Indeed, romantic partners and children of ever-incarcerated persons are far more likely to experience communicable diseases, cardiovascular disease, poor mental health, and higher mortality (for reviews of this large body of research, see Schnittker et al. 2011; Wildeman and Muller 2012). Scholars have theorized that it is these individuals’ contact with the ever-incarcerated that results in poor health (i.e., through exposure to stress, diseases vectors, and the reduced earning power of ex-inmates). In contrast, the findings here suggest that this group’s negative health outcomes may also be due to crime control dynamics of health care organizations.

In short, the dual effect in the public ER reconciles and offers an organizational explanation for countervailing demographic trends in population health: incarceration’s positive effects on health outcomes for the incarcerated urban poor and negative effects on health outcomes for the urban poor outside of prison. By viewing crime control trends as more than just incarceration—studying how incarceration interacts with policing and crime control language in an organizational setting—it is possible to identify these countervailing demographic trends as concordant. The organizational dynamics of health care settings and the decision-making of health care workers are potential mechanisms through which criminal justice trends contribute to the population health of the urban poor.

This dual effect has important implications for policymakers. As a result of an aging prison population and inmate rights litigation (McDonald 1999; Simon 2013), between 2001 and 2008 median state spending on inmate health care rose 52 percent (Chokshi 2013). In addition to adequately addressing inmates’ health care needs, policymakers must consider this spending’s effect on health care for individuals outside of custody. For instance, police patrol expenditures or crime crackdowns might also include assessments of their potential effect on local medical resources. Potential crime control benefits must be weighed against potential health consequences. Should health care for individuals in custody and those not in custody be provided in separate settings or, perhaps, more rationally linked? And, given high rates of recidivism among ex-inmates, what are the added economic costs of inmates who—after finding it difficult to obtain health care outside of prison—return to prison with the same or worse health? Finally, although it is beyond the scope of this article, policymakers might consider the ethical and human rights implications of criminal violations—and all the lifelong legal and economic consequences they entail—becoming de facto gateways to health care for the urban poor. In short, given expanded crime control efforts in U.S. cities, health care for inmates/arrestees and health care for the urban poor must not be considered separate policy domains.

Contribution to Spillover Effects: Organizations, Not Just Returning Inmates

What does a focus on organizational dynamics imply about the study of spillover effects of imprisonment? Much of the scholarship on imprisonment’s broader impact on health (Schnittker et al. 2011), economic inequality (Harris, Evans, and Beckett 2010; Western and Pettit 2010), neighborhood attainment (Massoglia, Firebaugh, and Warner 2013), education (Hagan and Foster 2012), democracy (Manza and Uggen 2006), children and family dynamics (Wakefield and Wildeman 2014), and other features of U.S. life largely conceive of the inmate as the mechanism of influence for incarceration’s effects. Essentially, it is the inmate who receives negative effects from having ever been incarcerated and then exposes family members to these effects. Because the sheer number of inmates and ex-inmates is so large and so concentrated in specific demographic groups and urban areas, they are likely to have an effect observable at aggregate measures.

By bringing a focus on organizations and medical sociology’s study of health care workers into dialogue with the sociology of imprisonment and crime control, this article suggests that the spillover effects of incarceration may be conveyed not only by former inmates. Instead, researchers might also emphasize the role that organizational decision-making plays in conveying incarcerations’ spillover effects into communities. Hypothetically, even while returning inmates attempt to avoid the usual negative influences of having been incarcerated—for example, by finding stable employment, reintegrating into daily family life, or removing other ex-inmates from their social networks—inmates and their families could still be negatively affected by crime control’s spillover effects on organizations.

Attention to organizational context highlights the need for additional research. Long-term ethnographic research may help disentangle how organizational dynamics interact with other sources of disadvantage and how they accumulate over the life course. Statistical analyses could isolate the effect of types or characteristics of organizations on specific outcomes, such as morbidity, household earnings, or educational attainment. For instance, in the case of educational outcomes, beyond variables that measure ever-incarcerated parents or delinquent peers, scholars could consider the presence of police in schools. Such organizational context variables may affect people who have little to no formal contact with criminal justice.

Research might also compare the specifics of the organizational dynamics found here—rushing and delaying resources—with similar processes in other settings. Auyero (2012), for example, focuses on the continual and endless waiting the Argentinean poor must endure to obtain welfare checks, housing subsidies, identification cards, and court rulings. For Auyero, key features of waiting as a mode of statecraft are (1) spontaneous postponements that come without warning and are given little or no explanation and the (2) inexplicable granting of resources to some waiters over others. While Auyero (2012) contends that individuals selected for postponement and those selected to receive resources are seemingly chosen at random with little logic, the case of the urban public ER in the United States suggests there is discernible organizational logic for why some groups of poor people are chosen for postponements over others. Through similar comparisons, scholars might build a more general theory of the logic of rushing and delaying in public institutions that serve the poor.

The results of this study suggest that crime control trends in medical settings are an important component of how health care resources are distributed. The findings show that crime control mediates the urban poor’s access to health care in countervailing ways, making access easier for those in custody and more difficult for those not in custody. By focusing on a health care organization that primarily serves the urban poor—the public ER—I have laid the foundation for a deeper understanding of the degree to which incarceration, policing, and crime control language fuel health and health inequality.