Jul 27, 2022
Anne E. Parsons (UNC Greensboro)
From asylum to prison:
Deinstitutionalization and the rise of mass incarceration after
1945
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.
AWARDS & DISTINCTIONS
Co-winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, Disability History Association
About the Author
Anne E. Parsons is associate professor of history at the University
of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she serves as the Director
of Public History.
For more information about Anne E. Parsons, visit the Author
Page.
Reviews
“Parsons has written an excellent book about hopes, frustrations,
and failures of deinstitutionalization and decarceration—one that
will be of interest to historians, sociologists, psychologists and
psychiatrists, policy makers, and students of disability
studies.”--Journal of the History of Medicine
“A finely detailed assessment . . . Parsons places punitive shifts in criminal justice system perspectives and practice . . . at the forefront of the increased use of jails and prisons for mentally ill or psychiatrically disabled persons.”--ICCA Journal
“An important work that urges scholars to consider how the contemporary mass incarceration crisis and overincarceration of people with mental illness in the United States has roots in a longer history of state-funded custodial institutions. . . . This book should garner much discussion in graduate seminars and would be a valuable read for anyone interested in the history of psychiatry, institutions, and the carceral state.”--H-Net Reviews
“Parsons advances the compelling argument that a history of deinstitutionalization must be understood as inextricably intertwined with a history of mass incarceration in the United States. . . . As From Asylum to Prison powerfully demonstrates, the racialized and punitive political calculus that drove state and federal policies toward mass incarceration in the 1980s still persists – largely unrevised and too often unchallenged – to the present day.”--Journal of Social History
“From Asylum to Prison definitively shows that asylums must be considered part of the carceral state—and that their ‘deinstitutionalization’ was less about shuttering asylums than it was repurposing them into prisons. The story of the country's move from asylum to prisons is one of reinstitutionalization rather than deinstitutionalization, not one of emptying institutions but shifting their function toward even more punitive ends.”--Reviews in American History
“From Asylum to Prison joins a rich and growing literature on the history of the American carceral state. By centering the post-World War II expansion of the U.S. prison system squarely within the history of deinstitutionalization, Parsons reminds readers that mass incarceration, far from being a distinct historical phenomenon, has deep historical roots outside the halls of the criminal legal system. At the same time, however, as Parsons is contending with an ongoing social and political problem in the U.S., From Asylum to Prison demonstrates . . . the potentially life-changing value of historical research for the present and future.”--History Teacher
240 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 10 halftones, 1 map, 1 graph, 1 table, notes, bibl., index
PAPERBACK ISBN: 978-1-4696-6947-2
Published: February 2022
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-4696-4064-8
Published: September 2018
Justice, Power, and Politics
PAPERBACK $24.95
E-BOOK $19.99
Speaker 1:
Today on Author Podcast, we're speaking about the book From Asylum
to Prison. We're talking about how the mental asylums were, at one
time, very prominent in the U.S., and they've declined over time.
At perhaps the same timeframe, the prisons have become much more
prominent. We're looking at that interplay between these asylums
and the prisons. The book is called From Asylum to Prison. It's
published by University of North Carolina Press. The author is Anne
E. Parsons.
Speaker 1:
I have some reviews here from Bernard Harcourt of Columbia
University. Through a meticulous analysis, rich in archival
research, Anne Parsons brilliantly illuminates the historical
transformations in custodial confinement from the asylum to the
prison. Parsons reveals how prisons and correctional facilities
filled the emptying spaces of mental hospitalization. Jonathan
Metzl, Anne Parsons brilliantly unpacks a vital social justice
issue of the past half century: how prisons became de facto sites
of treatment for persons with severe psychiatric disabilities in
the U.S. Beautifully written, persuasively argued, Parsons pushes
readers to rethink many longstanding assumptions about the ways we
as a society treat the most needy among us. Anne Parsons is
Associate Professor, Director of Public History, University of
North Carolina at Greensboro. Welcome, Professor Parsons.
Anne Parsons:
Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be
here.
Speaker 1:
Thank you. The end of that review from Jonathan Metzl was talking
about the basic issue here is how we as a society treat the most
needy among us. You include a personal note in the book about your
own personal connection to these issues and your motivations to
write the book. Could you touch on those?
Anne Parsons:
Yeah, sure. One of the things that got me interested in this
subject was the fact that in my own family, my grandmother's
sister, Ruth, was institutionalized in an asylum for what was
called the Feeble-Minded in 1929. She had severe intellectual
developmental disabilities and physical disabilities, and she was
institutionalized from about 1929 until her death in 1969. For me,
it really resonated this period when there weren't many community
options for people with severe intellectual developmental
disabilities, but then also psychiatric disabilities. That really
was one of the core questions of this book.
Speaker 1:
I find that, I guess this is obvious, but this is the point of
history is to be able to tell us that the way things are today is
not given from God. It not only can be different in the future, but
it was different in the past. When I look at this, I don't know if
we could just start with, maybe you could give a verbal overview of
this figure one in your book or just the general trends about,
well, the basic fact that jumps out to me is that who would've
thought that in the 1940s and '50s, there were much fewer people in
prison than in mental asylums, shocking really.
Anne Parsons:
Yes, it had me flabbergasted. I also, before going to graduate
school, had worked with the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana
on prison reform. And so, when I began my doctoral work, I assumed
that prison rates had always been high and certainly higher than
that of mental hospital rates. But in fact, the 1940s and '50s, the
rates of hospitalization dwarfed the rates of people in prison. One
example of that is that in the 1950s in Pennsylvania, which is the
state I study, the rates of people in the state's mental health
institutions was over 40,000. I think over 40,000 today is also the
rates of people in prison. It was stunning to me as well when I
found that.
Speaker 1:
Right. I think one of the factoids in your book was that there was
one mental institution, Byberry, that had as many people in it as
all of the prison population in Pennsylvania.
Anne Parsons:
Yes. It was over 6,000 at the time.
Speaker 1:
I guess we can think of two things. The time series here is that...
Can you go through the time series about how things change when
prison went up and institutionalized and these mental hospitals
were deinstitutionalized?
Anne Parsons:
There's a wonderful statistical study by Bernard Harcourt on this
and I relied on this at the beginning of the book as you mentioned.
What the graphs told us for the rates of people in mental
hospitals, for people within here, it's with for people with
psychiatric disabilities, he did not include people with
intellectual developmental disabilities, that it was almost like if
you can imagine a roller coaster of really getting at its peak in
the 1950s and then being high right into the early sixties. Then
really just, and I think it was over half a million people in the
country were in mental health institutions at that time. Then
really from the 1960s, '70s, into the early '80s just dramatically
going down like that roller coaster, down into, think it's
certainly below 100,000, nearing 50,000 into the late 20th century.
And so, it really just dramatically went down.
Anne Parsons:
On the other side, at the same time, the rates of imprisonment if
we're thinking about that rollercoaster at the same time is low. In
the 1950s and '60s, certainly under 100,000, well under 100,000. It
really is right at the end of the 1970s to the '80s that it starts
to kick up and exponentially goes high by the end of the 20th
century. As we know, it has yet to dramatically go down.
Speaker 1:
That's right. The prison rate is pretty constant in terms of the
rate per capita between 1928 and until the late '70s, and then it
goes increasing. The mental hospital rate is high from the mid-'30s
until the '60s. Then, as you say, it craters and it continued to go
down. Now, one of the interesting things is you can sum them up as
the figure does. You see that the combined rate in terms of both
mental hospital and prison says it was high in the '40s and '50s,
then it went down due to deinstitutionalization of the mental
hospitals. Then it went back up and the combined rate at the end of
at around 2000 was the same as it had been before. Accrued, and you
say in the book an incorrect reading of this would be, oh, well the
people who were in mental hospitals were released, they went out
into the streets for a while and then they were arrested and they
were put in prison. That would fit the story, but it's false.
Anne Parsons:
Correct. I mean, it's one piece of the puzzle, but a small piece of
the puzzle. The most basic example I give of that, that people
didn't just shift from mental hospitals to prisons was the fact
that mental hospitals were roughly 50% female, women. Then you look
at the rates of prisons and it's a minority of people.
Speaker 1:
That's a great time.
Anne Parsons:
Another big element is that people in mental hospitals, the
demographics were much older. Indeed, mental hospitals in 1940s,
'50s, '60s often served in some ways as a nursing home purpose for
people who were elderly. And so, those age demographics were
totally different too. It's one piece of the puzzle that there's
some of this transinstitutionalization that scholars call, but that
is not the justification for the whole-
Speaker 1:
Right. And, race, of course.
Anne Parsons:
Correct. Yes.
Speaker 1:
The population was mainly white in the mental hospitals.
Anne Parsons:
Correct. Exactly.
Speaker 1:
We could talk about the decline in the mental hospital rate, and
then we can also then later talk about the increase in the prison
rate, the decline in the mental hospital rate, what caused
that?
Anne Parsons:
Here's the thing. I'm supposed to give answers that are 60 to 90
seconds and I want an entire lecture.
Speaker 1:
That's Twitter-like.
Anne Parsons:
Right, exactly.
Speaker 1:
I'm sorry to do that. I mean-
Anne Parsons:
No, I can answer it. Just-
Speaker 1:
Well, let me phrase it better though that your book gets into this
in greater detail, but maybe you could just give a hint as to what
people would find there. That's a good correction, I think.
Anne Parsons:
What I find is that in the 1960s, there really is this change in
treatment and modality. There have been new developments in
treating people through psychotherapy and also the advent of
psychotropic medications. Treatments are changing. And so, there's
more of a belief that people could be treated in communities rather
than being sent away for long periods of time. It's getting away
from that concept that a place, an asylum, can transform a person,
which was deeply embedded in the asylum movement. That really is
changing things in the '60s.
Anne Parsons:
There also is in the '60s that really leads to changes in the '70s
I found is the rise patient activism, the anti-psychiatry movement,
challenges to conditions in mental hospitals themselves, many of
which were quite large and conditions had dramatically deteriorated
in the 1940s and '50s. And so, there were a lot of exposes about
mental hospital conditions. And so, with that, came this push to
try to improve mental hospitals. With that, bring them down from
being, in the case of Byberry, over 6,000 people down to smaller
numbers. Then the final thing is really comes in the late '60s and
'70s, the rise of patient's rights and major challenges to
involuntary confinement, which changed the landscape of who could
be confined. That's the very brief overview, and again, it
could-
Speaker 1:
Appreciate that. Thank you. One of the things you brought out was
who would've thought when you talk about the, I guess, public
response, public attention or outrage. Interestingly, there's a big
role in your story for conscientious objectors, who you would
think, why are they involved in this?
Anne Parsons:
That was just fascinating to me, finding out the story of
conscientious objectors and mental hospitals. During World War II,
many conscientious objectors were assigned to do their service in
mental health institutions. When they were there, a number of
conscientious objectors based out of Philadelphia actually began
organizing to learn about the conditions in many hospitals and
institutions around the country, because they were seeing large
amounts of violence or neglect at that time. As conscientious
objectors, they did not just oppose violence in war, but also just
in day-to-day life. They were seeing those terrible conditions in
part because the great depression had led to diminishing state
funds to mental health institutions. Then, also, the war itself
pulled money away from domestic affairs to the war effort.
Anne Parsons:
And so, because of that, mental hospitals really were in terrible
conditions. And so, these conscientious objectors really organized
to expose through photographs, through articles, what they were
finding and to advocate for better conditions. For me, personally,
it was difficult to see those conditions and to know that my great
aunt was in an institution like that during that period and just
some of the pictures that I had seen from Stockley, which is where
she was in Southern Delaware, were really disturbing. And so, it
truly was a different world that these conscientious objectors were
trying to really make them better. I mean, they made some
significant gains.
Speaker 1:
There's no doubt prisons are today at a different world and out of
sight, out of mind. The conscientious objectors then, I mean, one
thing is you don't see this idea of patient rights. I think we've
come a long way probably, but there's still a lot of stigma around
psychiatric disability and there's still only the beginnings, I
guess, of a neurodiversity, pride movement. It's not the sort of
thing where people are proud to identify as someone who has had
mental illness and also with incarceration, it's not a group that
goes out and advocates for itself. That's my impression, I don't
know, but the conscientious objectors seem to have, do you think of
them as going in and getting that started?
Anne Parsons:
Certainly, the conscientious objectors were really in the 1940s and
early '50s, because they form an organization that continues into
the 1950s, were really putting front and center the human rights of
people who are institutionalized in mental hospitals in front of
people and saying that these human rights matter, these people's
lives matter. That is important in laying the foundation for
patients rights activism in the '60s and '70s, which really I was
struck by how in the '60s and '70s, one of the rights movements
that often is lost in history was mental patients rights activism.
In Pennsylvania, where I had studied, there was the formation of
the Alliance for the liberation of mental patients. These groups
are around the country, radio shows that are trying to connect
people and trying to organize and fight that stigma, but also fight
against involuntary confinement in that time, which was different
than today.
Speaker 1:
I think another thing you mentioned in the book is that one of the
things about World War II is it showed that psychiatric distress is
not a matter of genes and early childhood. It's something that can
be due to an experience you have as an adult for getting PTSD. The
conscientious objectors led to an article in, I guess, a couple of
things that really brought attention to the asylums. One was a life
article, another was the book and movie Snake Pit. I don't know,
whichever one of those seems most worth talking about now, could
you elaborate on it?
Anne Parsons:
One of the things that I found throughout researching this history
from the '40s to the '80s, but that was particularly interesting in
the '40s and '50s was that major news coverage and books and movies
greatly impacted or affected the public's opinion about these
places. That was one thing I was really interested in because as
we're thinking today about how do we approach and make changes in
our carceral system today with our incredibly high rates of
prisons, looking at how the media, how books, how movies affected
was really interesting.
Anne Parsons:
And so, one of the things that you bring up was the Life Magazine
articles in which many conscientious objectors had taken
photographs of conditions of mental hospitals. And so, there was
literally photographic essays that were published that were showing
people what literally it looked like. Those pictures often would
have people who were only partially dressed or completely
undressed, who were sitting in rooms without adequate furniture,
who were in spaces that, in many ways, look like prisons with bars
on the windows. These pictures at points really resembled
photographs from the Holocaust.
Anne Parsons:
It's interesting, because right now, my research has taken a
dramatic turn into a project on the history of the Holocaust in
Ukraine. I'm working on an exhibit there. When I go back and look
at those photos, again, I'm reminded how people are trying to use
what had just been shown, these incredible human rights abuses and
maltreatment of people that had happened in Europe during the war
and they're trying to show that many of these same abuses are not
the same, but that incredible abuses against humanity are happening
in these mental health institutions. It's really intentionally
showing these pictures in a way that evoke those extreme human
rights abuses and are trying to get people to act. It very much
does.
Anne Parsons:
In Pennsylvania, I think, or it might actually have been in a
different state, the governor, and I almost want to say it was
Kansas, the governor ends up taking all of the metal chains and
restraints that are in hospitals throughout the state and brings
them together and literally boils them down. It really is leading
to major reforms in these areas that kick off
deinstitutionalization.
Speaker 1:
Well, this is the Maryland governor. You have a photo of the
Maryland governor casting the Mental Health Bell.
Anne Parsons:
Yes, that is potentially... Thank you for that.
Speaker 1:
Striking. They make a bell out of these chains and circles.
Anne Parsons:
Yes. The bell is now the symbol of Mental Health America, it's an
organization that continues over time.
Speaker 1:
Yes, there's one of the photographs you include in the book called
despair, which was in Life, May 6, 1946. It's just stunning. Once
you look at it, you can't get it out of your head. I guess, it's
out of sight, out of mind, but these articles you could say are
bringing it to public mind. Then, we have also these court cases
and a lot of court cases eventually ending up, and you go through
it in detail, but in the end, we end up with this standard of clear
and present danger of physical harm either to himself or others in
order to be involuntarily committed. Then, it's only for a short
period of time. Talk about how lax it was before then.
Anne Parsons:
Prior to then, the laws had allowed for commitments with doctor's
approval and the support of family members, but doctor's approval.
Once people had been committed, they often could not be released
without the institution approving the release, that type of thing.
There were very few, any due process protections at that time for
people in mental health institutions. And so, one of the ironies
there is that many people, in a time where due process in prisons
was still quite limited, but they were in some ways, there was a
little bit more due process in prisons than mental hospitals.
Anne Parsons:
One example there had been, I think, it was the case of The
Laughing Eel, who was a man who was a robber and had been
ultimately was institutionalized in a mental hospital and did not
go to prison and ended up spending a few decades in the mental
hospital. When his case came forward, probably would've faced maybe
a 10-year or so prison sentence, but that lack of real due process,
lack of access to attorney, that type of thing could lead to these
extended sentences. Now, that was not the case all the time, but it
really is trying to understand not everyone stayed in institutions
for decades. It shows that there was that lack of due process
protections that once people got in, it could be difficult to
leave.
Speaker 1:
Right. That was fascinating. I mean, at least in jail or prison,
there's a date that it's supposed to be done.
Anne Parsons:
Correct.
Speaker 1:
Right. You go through this Good Time Bill and some of the
opposition from the left was, we don't want things to be up in the
air. We want things to be... Because if it's just up to somebody to
allow them to be released, that'll just never happen. When you get
into a mental hospital, it could be forever.
Anne Parsons:
The Good Time Bill, thank you for bringing it up. The Good Time
Bill is reflecting a moment in time in the 1960s and '70s, where
people, policy makers, politicians, advocates were rethinking what
the criminal justice system and mental health system could be.
We're trying to look for more community-based alternatives. Out of
that came the Good Time Bill, which prison officials were saying,
"Maybe we should base this more based on rehabilitation," but you
get that pushback from people in mental hospitals. But it really
was an interesting moment in the '60s and '70s. This is a question
for you. I know you've been raising things, but just your thoughts
on that moment yourself.
Speaker 1:
Well, I thought that it was just someone who really tried to come
along with a good idea. I guess it was K. Leroy Irvis if I'm
reading this right. He came up with what he thought was a way of
reforming sentencing and really thought through about what it would
be and the bill did not pass. He ended up getting, not even, I
guess, not getting support from the left or from the right. It's
just made me think that so much is inertia, not good ideas, but
someone who was just really thoughtful and came up with what he
thought would work, but then politically, it's another question
entirely whether you're going to get it through. That was my sense
of it.
Anne Parsons:
Both in some ways was inertia, and in other ways, one of the things
I found was that the '70s, just as people were trying to think of
new solutions like K. Leroy Irvis was trying to make prisons more
humane or trying to give incentives for people to readjust to
society, that type of thing. At that very same moment, you see the
beginnings of the penal turn-
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Anne Parsons:
... in American society. That comes, I think, he was pushing for
the Good Time Bill right around the time of Attica and the Attica
prison uprising in which in the popular press afterwards, it really
turned prisoners into animals incredibly hard. You see the slow
hardening of what prison should be as more punitive spaces where
you're serving time. I think you're right to point out that from
the left, there was that concern around rehabilitation at the time,
that it could lead to that over extension of power like they had
had in mental hospitals. And so, there wasn't a huge amount of
support for those humane efforts too. Do you know what I mean? It
wasn't as if the left was coming out against it.
Speaker 1:
And so, in the '80s, which I remember well, there was this fear and
put people away that was what I thought it was palpable. We get
this rise in the number of people in prison and in prison for a
long time. I guess, there are people out there who chose to be in
mental institutions. I don't think there's anyone who chooses to be
in prison, or it would be difficult to think of anyone who chooses
to be in a prison. This has just started in the '80s and has just
continued through the end of the century.
Anne Parsons:
It's interesting when we're talking about the '80s and '90s and
this politics of fear, because it's interesting because one of the
things that's important to remember is the way that asylums grew so
large was through a politics of fear during the progressive era and
through the 1920s and '30s. There was a real fear-based politics
and conception that was rooted in eugenics around people who were
feeble-minded or people who were labeled as insane or mad that they
were a danger to society, more likely to be criminals, more likely
to... Actually, people who were feeble-minded who had intellectual
or developmental disabilities for instance were more likely to be
susceptible to do crime or to women were thought to be more likely
to be prostitutes. This is a very different conception from
today.
Anne Parsons:
And so, that fear politics really helped lead to that fueling of
big asylums where people were sent. I think we see that again in
the '80s in a different form, only this time, it's much more around
breaking the law at the point of law breaking. People aren't
choosing to go into prisons, but crimes or misdemeanors that might
have previously people may have been sent to mental hospitals or
just not imprisoned in the '70s, '80s, '90s, there starts to be
with the war on drugs, wars on crime that putting people away for
drug offenses, for new misdemeanors, trespassing, and that shift to
prisons and jails.
Speaker 1:
What's the difference between prisons and jail? Jails or local and
prisons are federal, or is that essentially the idea?
Anne Parsons:
That's a great question. Jails are when someone is arrested. If you
are charged with a crime and arrested, then you're placed in jail
pending trial. Some people do serve their sentences for
misdemeanor, smaller crimes there. And so, you do have people who
stay for longer periods in jails. If people are then sentenced,
tried and sentenced, or plead guilty and are sentenced, then they
go to state prisons separately.
Speaker 1:
I gotcha.
Anne Parsons:
And so, today, I think the rates of people with psychiatric
disabilities in jail, I looked at a report that had said, it was
from 2014, but it gives you a sense of the numbers, which was that
20% of the people in jails that were diagnosed with serious mental
illness, that's 20% and about 15% of people in prisons. It led to,
at that time, 383,000 people with severe psychiatric diagnoses were
in prisons, in jails, which at that time was higher than the number
of people in psychiatric hospitals.
Speaker 1:
If you think about the middle class, say, is... I think there was a
book called The Search for Order, trying to find worried about
people on the margins and whether it was going to disrupt their
lives, and on the margins would be people who were unemployed,
people who were prisoners, juvenile, delinquents, that was the
word, and just a sense that these people on the outside were going
to poison the system and needed to be allotted, put somewhere, done
something to, and it ended up being put away where they don't have
to be thought of, I guess.
Speaker 1:
One of the things that happens then is, as you say, we don't know
what is a sign of insanity, what is a sign of criminality. We know
that there's a sign that this person is on the margins in some way.
For example, I think you mentioned homosexuality was one time...
Well, certainly, at one time it was thought to be a mental illness
and it was also thought to be criminal maybe, I'm not sure, but
it's something that now we look at and say, "Well, it doesn't seem
like it is either, but it was thought to be just disruptive in some
way."
Anne Parsons:
Homosexuality was criminalized in the 20th century and it was just
in 2005 with Lawrence v. Texas that the Supreme Court decision in
which can no longer criminalize crimes of sodomy, that type of
thing. And so, it was literally had been criminalized. People,
1950s, '40s were often institutionalized in mental hospitals around
homosexuality or sexual deviance, people who were trans were more
institutionalized in mental hospitals. It was both considered
social deviance and led to psychiatric diagnoses and
institutionalization, but then also it was criminalized during
this-
Speaker 1:
That's a good example. Also, there was a story about Allen Ginsberg
in your book about him getting put into a mental asylum, I think,
for what we would now consider a crime. It was a traffic crime, I
think, perhaps. Let me look. Now, this is from page 37, the story
of another famous nonconformist elucidates the connections between
law breaking and mental hospitals in the 1940s. In 1949, police
arrested a young Allen Ginsberg for participating in a car ride
that turned into a police chase and wreck. In lieu of jail time,
Ginsberg agreed to mental hospitalization. Right. There, something
like a disorderly upsetting issue with cars and accidents now would
be in the courts. At the time, the person was sent to a mental
hospital for a time. It's fascinating.
Speaker 1:
One of the things that I think the book is talking about is in the
push to... It's always easier and possible to look at the past and
try to figure it out. To predict the future is another thing. But
when we think about decarceration, as tricky as this is, what are
some of the lessons that we might learn that you think people
should pay attention to?
Anne Parsons:
The biggest lesson really was that in the movement to
deinstitutionalize mental hospitals, there was a vision of trying
to make society more just and equitable. While
deinstitutionalization brought about the rights of people and
significantly better conditions in mental health institutions, it
did not bring about full community acceptance and really robust
funding of healthcare, housing, supports for people on the margins,
as you said. And so, as we approach decarceration today, how can we
fight not only for reducing prison beds, but also changing society
so that new forms of carceral systems don't emerge.
Speaker 1:
Right. It's interesting, people say, "You need to have something
measurable, otherwise you don't know what you're doing, and
otherwise you don't know if you're accomplishing something." In a
way, that's true. But on the other hand, once you have something
measurable, if that's all you're thinking about like number of
people in the hospital, and the number of people in prison, you
can't focus only on that.
Anne Parsons:
It's true, that over focus on those graphs or the statistics.
Speaker 1:
Well, anyway, there's a lot more in the book and great texture,
examples. There's only really that one graph in the book. The book
is not a book of graphs, it's a book of stories. Thank you very
much, Professor Parsons. The book is From Asylum to Prison,
subtitle, Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration
after 1945. The University of North Carolina Press. Thank you for
talking with me.
Anne Parsons:
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.