In hospital emergency rooms, many patients are treated like criminals, even as actual inmates and arrestees are prioritized

A lack of resources to treat all incoming patients is a longstanding and seemingly intractable problem faced by hospital emergency rooms across the country. But how do health professionals triage incoming patients to decide who gets care and who does not? In a new ethnographic study of hospital admissions, Armando Lara-Millan finds that hospital staffs tend to invoke criminal stigma to deny care to those that fit certain ‘criminal’ profiles, while police patrols encourage those who are concerned about arrest to leave. He contrasts these practices with the prioritization of inmates and arrestees who are given beds regardless of the severity of their conditions.