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. Parsons shows 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.