From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945

The book "Asylum in the Prison Industrial Complex" by Anne Parsons reveals that the asylum did not die during deinstitutionalization but returned in the modern prison industrial complex as the government shifted to a more punitive, institutional approach to social deviance. Parsons tracks how the lack of community-based services, fear-based politics around mental illness, and the economics of institutions led to the incarceration epidemic in Pennsylvania.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 01 February 2022
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Many view asylums as a relic of a bygone era, with state governments taking steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in psychiatric hospitals. As a result, numerous mental health facilities closed down. However, 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.

Parsons focuses on Pennsylvania, the state that ran one of the largest mental health systems in the country. She 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.

Weight: 384g
Dimension: 156 x 234 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781469669472