The Creation of the UHSA: A New Regulation of Detention?

In 2010, at its opening, the first unit designed to hospitalize prisoners, called UHSA, was both criticized as security-driven and praised as promoting equal access to care. To understand how UHSAs developed in this contentious environment, we consider the rules authorizing confinement through an interdisciplinary perspective, integrating these rules’ normative power, the context in which they were developed and their social use. Drawing on legal and administrative literature and on interviews, we show that the historical dichotomy in the regulation of confinement and the growth of mental health care in prison has led to design rules for the UHSA that contribute to transform the meaning of confinement.