Criminalizing Breath: Asthma, Institutionalization, and the Policing of Black Health

By the late twentieth century, public health officials and medical researchers increasingly recognized asthma as a crisis in Black urban communities. Yet rather than attributing rising asthma rates to environmental and structural conditions, medical discourse in the 1970s reframed the disease as psychosomatic — an emotional response to frustration, protest, and instability. This medicalization of Black breathlessness had far-reaching consequences.

In carceral settings, asthmatic symptoms were frequently dismissed or minimized, with deadly results. Black newspapers, and in particular The Black Panther Party’s publication, documented cases of asthmatic prisoners denied medical care, revealing how the criminalization of asthma was intertwined with broader patterns of medical neglect in U.S. jails and prisons. At the same time, Black children with asthma were institutionalized in residential asthma centers, sometimes at the recommendation of child protective services, reinforcing state intervention in Black families under the guise of medical care.

Drawing on oral histories of former Black residents at the Sunair Home for Asthmatic Children, as well as case studies of incarcerated asthmatics, this paper examines the blurred boundaries between medical treatment, social control, and punishment. I argue that both the wheezing Black child and the wheezing Black protester were seen as disruptive social threats — subjects of state surveillance and intervention rather than individuals in need of care. By tracing the criminalization of asthma across medical, carceral, and social welfare institutions, this paper reframes asthma not only as a site of public health concern but as a contested battleground of race, medicine, and policing in the post-Civil Rights era.