Mental Health and Incarceration
Class
About this Module
Class 3: A World Without Custodial Institutions
Introduction:
In the 1960s and 1970s, policymakers and activists challenged the institutional model of asylums and prisons, arguing that these places harmed people more than they helped them. This class explores the cultural and political discussions of a world without custodial institutions and the results of these past proposals.
Class Resources
- Parsons, Anne. From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018, pp. 69—122.
- Photograph of President John F. Kennedy signing the Community Mental Health Act in 1963. Care and Custody: A History of Mental Health. U.S. National Library of Medicine. May 1, 2020.
- Still of Chief Bromden breaking out of the hospital in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Care and Custody: A History of Mental Health. U.S. National Library of Medicine. May 1, 2020.
Discussion Questions
- Why did social reformers and activists critique prisons and mental hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s?
- Why did they imagine that the era of prisons and mental hospitals would end?
- Why did the calls to deinstitutionalize mental hospitals succeed while the call to deinstitutionalize prisons fail?
- Activity: On a whiteboard or large poster paper, students draw out their vision of what an ideal criminal justice system might look like 50 years from now. What key elements would be different from today? How would people diagnosed with mental health conditions be treated in their new system?
