From Asylum to Prison

From Asylum to Prison PDF Author: Anne E. Parsons
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469640643
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
To many, asylums are a relic of a bygone era. State governments took steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in psychiatric hospitals, and many mental health facilities closed down. Yet, as Anne Parsons reveals, the asylum did not die during deinstitutionalization. Instead, it returned in the modern prison industrial complex as the government shifted to a more punitive, institutional approach to social deviance. Focusing on Pennsylvania, the state that ran one of the largest mental health systems in the country, Parsons tracks how the lack of community-based services, a fear-based politics around mental illness, and the economics of institutions meant that closing mental hospitals fed a cycle of incarceration that became an epidemic. This groundbreaking book recasts the political narrative of the late twentieth century, as Parsons charts how the politics of mass incarceration shaped the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals and mental health policy making. In doing so, she offers critical insight into how the prison took the place of the asylum in crucial ways, shaping the rise of the prison industrial complex.

From Asylum to Prison

From Asylum to Prison PDF Author: Anne E. Parsons
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781469640655
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Book Description
"Prisons and asylums developed in parallel in the United States as institutions dedicated to the quarantine, detention, and punishment of the socially marginal. A widely accepted popular narrative holds that deinstitutionalization from the 1950s to the 1990s diminished the role of asylums in America. Yet, as Anne E. Parsons reveals, the asylum did not die--in fact, many of its structures have been transformed into prisons, just as prisons have shifted to locking up those who in an earlier era would have been sent to an asylum"--

Asylums

Asylums PDF Author: Erving Goffman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351327747
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
A total institution is defined by Goffman as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated, individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. Prisons serve as a clear example, providing we appreciate that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions whose members have broken no laws. This volume deals with total institutions in general and, mental hospitals, in particular. The main focus is, on the world of the inmate, not the world of the staff. A chief concern is to develop a sociological version of the structure of the self. Each of the essays in this book were intended to focus on the same issue--the inmate's situation in an institutional context. Each chapter approaches the central issue from a different vantage point, each introduction drawing upon a different source in sociology and having little direct relation to the other chapters. This method of presenting material may be irksome, but it allows the reader to pursue the main theme of each paper analytically and comparatively past the point that would be allowable in chapters of an integrated book. If sociological concepts are to be treated with affection, each must be traced back to where it best applies, followed from there wherever it seems to lead, and pressed to disclose the rest of its family.

Haunted Asylums, Prisons, and Sanatoriums

Haunted Asylums, Prisons, and Sanatoriums PDF Author: Jamie Davis
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
ISBN: 073873750X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
Recounts supernatural encounters from ten well-known U.S. institutions, including West Virginia Penitentiary and St. Albans Sanatorium, in a work that features photographs, highlights from site tours, and historical information.

Memorial [to the Legislature of Massachusetts on the condition of idiots and lunatics in prisons and asylums, etc.]

Memorial [to the Legislature of Massachusetts on the condition of idiots and lunatics in prisons and asylums, etc.] PDF Author: Dorothea Lynde Dix
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Almshouses
Languages : en
Pages : 32

Book Description


Waiting for an Echo

Waiting for an Echo PDF Author: Christine Montross
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143110667
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
“A haunting and harrowing indictment . . . [a] significant achievement.” —The New York Times Book Review L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist * New York Times Book Review Paperback Row * Time Best New Books July 2020 Waiting for an Echo is a riveting, rarely seen glimpse into American jails and prisons. It is also a damning account of policies that have criminalized mental illness, shifting large numbers of people who belong in therapeutic settings into punitive ones. Dr. Christine Montross has spent her career treating the most severely ill psychiatric patients. This expertise—the mind in crisis—has enabled her to reckon with the human stories behind mass incarceration. A father attempting to weigh the impossible calculus of a plea bargain. A bright young woman whose life is derailed by addiction. Boys in a juvenile detention facility who, desperate for human connection, invent a way to communicate with one another from cell to cell. Overextended doctors and correctional officers who strive to provide care and security in environments riddled with danger. Our methods of incarceration take away not only freedom but also selfhood and soundness of mind. In a nation where 95 percent of all inmates are released from prison and return to our communities, this is a practice that punishes us all.

Asylum, Prison, and Poorhouse

Asylum, Prison, and Poorhouse PDF Author: Dorothea Lynde Dix
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780809321636
Category : Altruism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
The appalling conditions endured by most mentally ill inmates in prisons, jails, and poorhouses led her to take an active interest also in prison reform and in efforts to ameliorate poverty.

Administrations of Lunacy

Administrations of Lunacy PDF Author: Mab Segrest
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620972980
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Book Description
"Whew! They going to send around here and tie you up and drag you off to Milledgeville. Them fat blue police chasing tomcats around alleys." —Berenice in The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers A scathing and original look at the racist origins of the field of modern psychiatry, told through the story of what was once the largest mental institution in the world, by the prize-winning author of Memoir of a Race Traitor After a decade of research, Mab Segrest, whose Memoir of a Race Traitor forever changed the way we think about race in America, turns sanity itself inside-out in a stunning book that will become an instant classic. In December 1841, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum was founded on land taken from the Cherokee nation in the then-State capitol of Milledgeville. A hundred years later, it had become the largest insane asylum in the world with over ten thousand patients. To this day, it is the site of the largest graveyard of disabled and mentally ill people in the world. In April, 1949, Ebony magazine reported that for black patients, "the situation approaches Nazi concentration camp standards . . . unbelievable this side of Dante's Inferno." Georgia's state hospital was at the center of psychiatric practice and the forefront of psychiatric thought throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America—centuries during which the South invented, fought to defend, and then worked to replace the most developed slave culture since the Roman Empire. A landmark history of a single insane asylum at Milledgeville, Georgia, A Peculiar Inheritance reveals how modern-day American psychiatry was forged in the traumas of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, when African Americans carrying "no histories" entered from Freedmen's Bureau Hospitals and home counties wracked with Klan terror. This history set the stage for the eugenics and degeneracy theories of the twentieth century, which in turn became the basis for much of Nazi thinking in Europe. Segrest's masterwork will forever change the way we think about our own minds.

Baby Jails

Baby Jails PDF Author: Philip G. Schrag
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520971094
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
“I worked in a trailer that ICE had set aside for conversations between the women and the attorneys. While we talked, their children, most of whom seemed to be between three and eight years old, played with a few toys on the floor. It was hard for me to get my head around the idea of a jail full of toddlers, but there they were.” For decades, advocates for refugee children and families have fought to end the U.S. government’s practice of jailing children and families for months, or even years, until overburdened immigration courts could rule on their claims for asylum. Baby Jails is the history of that legal and political struggle. Philip G. Schrag, the director of Georgetown University’s asylum law clinic, takes readers through thirty years of conflict over which refugee advocates resisted the detention of migrant children. The saga began during the Reagan administration when 15-year-old Jenny Lisette Flores languished in a Los Angeles motel that the government had turned into a makeshift jail by draining the swimming pool, barring the windows, and surrounding the building with barbed wire. What became known as the Flores Settlement Agreement was still at issue years later, when the Trump administration resorted to the forced separation of families after the courts would not allow long-term jailing of the children. Schrag provides recommendations for the reform of a system that has brought anguish and trauma to thousands of parents and children. Provocative and timely, Baby Jails exposes the ongoing struggle between the U.S. government and immigrant advocates over the duration and conditions of confinement of children who seek safety in America.

Insane

Insane PDF Author: Alisa Roth
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9781541646476
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
An urgent exposé of the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisons America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. As many as half of all people in America's jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.