Agitated children, ‘uncooperative’ foreign nationals held in privately-run immigrant detention facilities, depressed and plaintive elders in for-profit nursing homes and soldiers facing repeated deployment with little dwell time: they have all been guinea pigs in a giant (un)scientific experiment to see just how docile and cheap human lives can be made. And what of ‘free society’ itself? In a country where 16.7 per cent (one in six) adult Americans take at least one psychopharmaceutical regularly (with 80 per cent of those doing so on a long-term basis), freedom must be, if not redefined, then at least reappraised. Yes, a pocket of silence may have lingered within the scholarship on US mass incarceration, but Anthony Ryan Hatch’s masterful Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America makes that silence speak volumes.