...This chapter explores how the 1980s hastened the shrinking of state mental health services and the rise of more punitive practices. President Ronald Reagan supported the continued downsizing of mental hospitals at both the state and federal levels. Homelessness and poverty became more immediate...

... a few main lessons for people working to make change. First, restrictive environments such as prisons and mental hospitals are inappropriate places to hold people on a mass scale. Second, it cautions people who are working to decarcerate prisons today. The history of deinstitutionalization proved...

...The introduction reviews the relevant histories of prisons, mental health policy, and the social welfare state. It highlights how recent scholarship has not connected the history of mental hospitals to the broader history of imprisonment. From Asylum to Prison frames historic...

...This chapter charts the multiple factors that spurred the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals in the 1960s. In 1963, Congress passed the Community Mental Health Act, which funded the creation of community mental health centers and provided inpatient and outpatient care, partial...

... to a deinstitutionalization in both mental health and corrections policy making. Not only did politicians and advocates look for alternatives to mental hospitals, they also sought alternatives to prisons. They expanded probation, parole, and furlough and created community corrections initiatives such as halfway houses...

...To many, insane asylums are a relic of a bygone era. State governments took steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in mental hospitals, and many mental health facilities closed down. Yet, as this book reveals, the asylum did not die during...

...This chapter explores how in the 1940s, mental hospitals comprised land, buildings, and workforces used by the states to feed and house hundreds of thousands of people. Conscientious objectors who did service work at mental hospitals in lieu of military conscription founded the National Mental...

...This chapter traces how the number of people in mental health institutions began to decline in the 1950s. It examines Pennsylvania as a case study and finds that riots and scandals at mental hospitals there put pressure on policy makers to move away from the institutional model of treatment. Public...