Lukas Metzner

Honors 354
March 2019

A History of Mental Institutions and Criminality in the United States

It seems strange that insane asylums, originally devised as charitable rehabilitative religious

institutions in the United States, have gained such notoriety--depictions of asylums from Batman

or ​One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s​ ​Nest​ make them among the scariest settings in our cultural

imagination. These institutions have played dual roles of treatment as well as confinement for

patients, which have led to tension between providing help to people labeled as mentally

unsound and holding them in treatment without consent. The tenuous balance between

rehabilitation and punishment has defined the history of mental institutions in the United States.

This paper will look at the development of the defining legal, cultural, and political contexts of

this relationship, from the oldest mental institutions established in colonial America, to the

deinstitutionalization that has defined mental healthcare in the United States. Despite rhetoric

about mental care historically focusing on humanitarianism, its primary function has always

mirrored that of incarceration: confinement and punishment of deviance and enforcement of

normalcy (Ben-Moshe 2014). As mental health care and incarceration developed, these two

institutions remained tied closely together as disciplinary power mechanisms. In the wave of

20th century deinstitutionalization, the line between the two was further dissolved as the

apparent “liberation” of institutionalized mental patients often led to their criminalization and

incarceration (Slate et al. 2013). Today, this connects to massive issues with incarceration of
mentally ill1 individuals, and racism within the criminal justice and healthcare systems. A

historical analysis on the conditions of mentally-related incarceration can help to inform us of the

place and forms that mental healthcare can take in an abolitionist future.

A Historical Overview of Asylums in the United States

The history of institutionalization and confinement of the insane in Western society reaches back

before the existence of the United States, but the establishment of mental institutions in the US

coincided with the rise of new attitudes towards the treatment of mental disability. Michel

Foucault posits in ​History of Madness​ (2006) that the societal reactions towards madness in

Europe had shifted significantly from the Enlightenment to the Modern Age due to structural

changes in the ways deviance was defined and treated. As capitalism came to shape the structure

of society, those who were unable or unwilling to fit the norms of labor production began to be

seen as deviants who needed to be either reconditioned or removed. Because they were not

productive, they were often eliminated, through laws such as “an act of 1575 covering both ‘the

punishment of vagabonds and relief of the poor’” through confinement in “houses of correction”

(Foucault 43). As Jean Khalfa summarizes in his introduction to the English translation of

History of Madness, the “classical experience” of madness in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries was defined by confinement (​xvii​). Insanity was seen as the antithesis of a structured,

rational, capitalist society, so society’s reaction was to lock up the insane along with other social

deviants, so that they would not taint “normal” society. If they could not be reconditioned, at

least they would be segregated from rational society.

1
As this paper will discuss, the term “mentally ill” is itself problematic: it carries implications of deviance
and inferiority and can justify unneeded or unwanted treatment. When I refer to “the mentally ill” or “the
mad” in this paper, I refer to those who have been given this label, with or without their consent.
The punishing conditions of confinement for those labeled as “mad” arose not only from an

intent to punish or reform, they also came about as a kind of sorting mechanism to keep out

people not desperate enough to endure them. This meant that the mad were funnelled into

horrific conditions as a direct result of their inability to provide labor. Ben-Moshe argues that

institutions meant to care for the mentally disabled have always been contradictory and abusive

(Ben-Moshe 2014). This came to be in part because of underlying assumptions that people would

try to manipulate and abuse charity. A precursor to the mental institution was the almshouse,

which was meant to provide for people absolutely unable to care for themselves. However,

because they were intended as places of charity, they attempted to sort out “unworthy poor,” who

were able but unwilling to work, by making conditions “sufficiently inhumane and abusive to

motivate anyone who could work to do so” (Ben-Moshe 2014, 4). While these almshouses were

not incarceratory in the modern sense, economic conditions and new laws against vagrancy and

begging made them effectively the only outcome for poor, mentally disabled people. They were

forced into miserable confinement essentially as a consequence of their inability to fit the norm

of labor production, and were not institutionally differentiated from other deviants like petty

criminals and sick or physically disabled people.

Confinement of the mentally disabled in Europe began as a process tied closely to criminal

punishment, with a primary function to discourage unusual behavior and ways of being and to

protect the rest of society. But a change began to take place around the end of the eighteenth

century along with the American and French revolutions. Foucault notes that this shift saw
madness, which had previously been associated with poverty and “unreason”, become

differentiated as a scientific and medical phenomenon, which defined its treatment in the modern

age. What changed was “not the inhuman rigour with which the mad were treated, but the

obviousness of confinement” (Foucault 2006, 417). It was the beginning of a humanitarian and

religious push for treatment over simple confinement for mental patients, also bolstered by a new

confidence in modern scientific medicine to master the mind. This attempt to “liberate” the

mentally disabled forms a historical backdrop as the first asylums were founded in the US based

off existing European models (Ben-Moshe 2014, 3). The modern approach to mental disability

was defined by specialization and “liberation”, but the freedom of mental patients was never

truly realized. A new political rationality held the belief that “under the right conditions imposed

from above, degenerate, disabled, criminalistic, or uncivilized peoples can be brought ‘up’ to

normative standards” (6). This did not mean that the mentally disabled became accepted, but

rather that “elimination could now be achieved by transforming individuals” (6).

The state-run insane asylum and its legal foundation were born in the U.S in the early nineteenth

century: four privately funded asylums were opened in the northeastern U.S. between 1817 and

1825, “and the widespread establishment of state-run mental institutions soon followed” (Testa

2010, 32). Two legal principles legitimated the ability of the state to confine the mentally ill. One

was ​parens patriae,​ meaning “parent of the fatherland,” which assigns to the government a

responsibility to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest. A

second legal principle, police power, requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens by

regulating behavior, with force if necessary (Testa 2010). A major motivating factor of the
establishment of state asylums was an increase in public concerns about crime (Ben-Moshe

2014). Disciplinary institutions such as prisons and hospitals were seen as the remedy for these

issues, due to the belief that these places could “create an environment that exemplified the

principles of a well-ordered society and thereby cure inmates of insanity, deficiency, and

deviancy…. By codifying madness as both illness and danger, psychiatry gained legitimacy”

(10).

While the establishment of mental institutions coincided with the scientific delineation of mental

illness from other forms of deviancy and sickness, it was still tied socially to crime and prisons.

Up to that point, mental illness was often seen as a moral flaw, but now there was a new idea that

people could be exempt from blame for their own actions due to mental conditions. However, the

way that treatment was carried out resembled criminal punishment. Mental patients’ access to

rights and freedom were limited, as “the societal view in America was that persons with mental

illness lacked the capacity to make decisions…. [thus] all [asylum] admissions were involuntary”

(Testa 2010, 32). Patients deemed insane and dangerous were not technically criminals, but they

faced similar conditions and treatment tactics. As mental hospitals became places for treatment

of mental illness by experts, their function expanded from confinement to encompass

surveillance of the mentally ill. Psychiatrists were believed to have the knowledge and expertise

to not just diagnose but even involuntarily commit anyone deemed mentally ill. In this sense

their normalizing power was equivalent to that of the judge and jury in criminal cases. And

although mental commitment was never said to be punitive in the same sense that prison was, it

took on all the characteristics of a carceral institution, which surveils, disciplines, and normalizes
its inmates. Much like incarceration, it confined individuals and held them up to a particular

standard of normalcy. Where criminals were surveilled and conditioned in prisons to become

upstanding members of society, mental patients underwent similar processes under the gazes of

psychiatrists in an effort to make them “normal”. Under the surface, prisons and mental

institutions performed similar normalizing disciplinary functions in society, and both formed

important parts of what Foucault called the “carceral archipelago” in ​Discipline and Punish

(1995, 297): institutions like residential schools and hospitals which used surveillance-based

power mechanisms developed in prisons to normalize individuals.

Like prisons, mental institutions diminished the personhood of those inside them and relegated

them to an objectified lower status. In ​Asylums,​ Erving Goffman (1961) characterizes both

prisons and asylums as “total institutions” which control every aspect of the inmate’s life and

movement. One characteristic of such institutions is that they “defile precisely those actions that

in civil society have the role of attesting to the actor and those in his presence that he has some

command over his world--that he is a person with ‘adult’ self-determination, autonomy, and

freedom of action” (Goffman 1961, 43). He notes that in mental institutions, patients’ “personal

inefficacy” is established by the institution, for example, when their speech is often ignored.

Overseers only acknowledge physical expressions from and interactions with the patients, which

is one way of degrading the autonomy of the patient (45). Through different tactics, people in

both asylums and prisons undergo rituals that destroy the individual’s social personhood.
Similarly to prisons, institutionalization in asylums for mental patients could result in civil death,

the loss of the civil rights that constitute ​legal​ personhood. Though voting rights were not

revoked like they were for felons, long periods of institutionalization could mean loss of custody

and property rights. The story of Elizabeth Packard is one example. In 1860, she was put in an

asylum by her clergyman husband as punishment for exploring outside of her Presbyterian faith.

After a three year commitment, she returned home to find that she had lost her property and

custody of her children (Packard 1867). Ms. Packard was an intelligent and motivated individual

who won back her rights after filing a civil suit, but not all asylum patients were so fortunate.

Due to long periods of isolation and inability to live their civil lives, mental patients ended up in

a deprived condition of civil death similar to that of convicts. Confinement would “deprive

[them] of the right to vote, to sit as a juror, to bear arms, to marry and hold office, because [their]

physical conditions were such that [they] could do none of these things” (Dayan 2013, 56-57).

The practice of isolation was inspired by the Puritanical belief that isolation led to spiritual

cleansing, but we now know that long periods of confinement result in misery and deterioration

even in mentally healthy individuals. For those with preexisting mental issues, confinement was

a “receptacle for imperfect creatures whose civil disease justified containment” (63). Even

though the legal status of asylum patients was not diminished like that of felons, they were

relegated to a state of ​de facto​ civil death due to their confinement in civil institutions which

limited their freedom of movement and ability to live a civil life. Despite the efforts of Packard

and other reformers, commitment to mental institutions reached a peak of 559,000 inpatients in

1953 (Testa 2010, 33).

Deinstitutionalization

Along with the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s, deinstitutionalization began as advocates

began to push for “both a psychiatric finding of ‘mental illness’ and a legal finding of ‘danger to

self or others’ in order to hospitalize or treat a person against her will” (Ward 2014, 258). This

was also closely tied to the Due Process movement of that decade, which pushed for legal

expansion of the rights of criminal defendants through cases like ​In re Gault,​ which confirmed

that juvenile defendants should have the same due process protections as adults. Two landmark

Supreme Court cases in the movement against involuntary mental commitment were ​Lessing v.

Schmidt a​ nd ​O’Connor v. Donaldson ​(Ward 2014). ​Lessing​ saw a Wisconsin woman named

Alberta Lessing protest a court decision to commit her to an asylum on grounds that she was a

danger to herself. The court agreed that she was not given due process before being examined by

police and psychiatrists, and rejected the argument of ​parens patriae​ in favor of the defendant’s

right to due process (Ward 2014). In the latter case Kenneth Donaldson, who had been diagnosed

with paranoid schizophrenia, was held involuntarily in a Florida asylum for fifteen years despite

multiple appeals was awarded his freedom and damages by the court. Evidence showed that he

was never dangerous to himself or others, and could support himself independently (Ward 2014).

Following these decisions, the grounds for involuntary commitment in the United States

narrowed drastically. That these cases were grounded in the Due Process revolution, which had

expanded the rights of criminal defendants, shows how involuntary commitment was

inextricably tied to criminal procedure, though the legal justification for state custody was

different.
Advocates for deinstitutionalization pushed for mental illness to be decoupled from the carceral

techniques the United States had utilized for treatment in the previous two centuries. In an era of

progressive social movements, the abolition of involuntary commitment gained traction as

mental institutions were increasingly seen as overcrowded, unsanitary, and badly run, and public

concern arose about violations of the rights of mentally ill people. There was a push away from

psychiatric commitment and towards community-based mental health care. By the 1990’s the

number of inpatient psychiatric patients in the United States had dropped to 30,000, down from a

high of over 550,000 in the 1950’s (Testa 2010).

However, deinstitutionalization was pushed by more than just humanitarian efforts, as

neoliberalism began to co-opt deinstitutionalization for its own goals, moving the focus of the

movement away from patient rights and toward economic efficiency. While forces like the Due

Process revolution and anti-psychiatry began to advocate for deinstitutionalization, it was the

economic arguments behind cuts for social safety nets that drove the movement the furthest

(Fakhoury 2007) (Gilmore 1999) (Testa 2010). The 1960’s saw the introduction of Medicaid and

Medicare, which transferred some expenses onto taxpayers, who began to believe that the cost

“was not worth the limited benefit that could be seen as a result of institutionalization” (Testa

2010, 33). As it progressed into the 1970’s, rising fiscally conservative views on public spending

held that “deinstitutionalization should go beyond replacing asylums, and should promote care

with as little institutional input as possible, preferring self-help to any professional support,

outpatient care to sheltered places or partial hospitalization, and sheltered places/partial

hospitalization to hospitals” (Fakhoury 2007, 313). R.W. Gilmore (1999) sees this period in the
early 1970’s as the dismantling of the Keynesianism that had defined the post-war golden age of

American capitalism. According to Gilmore, Keynesianism was defined by a “central logic that

full employment of resources enhances rather than impedes the production of new wealth” and

thus “provided workers with protections against calamity and opportunities for advancement”

(1999, 177). But during the economic crisis of the 70’s, capital moved its investments away from

the “social wage” and reduced its tax contributions, dismantling some of the welfare system,

which supported mental institutions. As the government lost tax revenue from large companies,

unpopular mental asylums were among the first institutions to go, under the veil of humanistic

reform. Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel ​One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest​ and its 1975 film adaptation

are examples of the changing image of mental institutions as cruel and oppressive in the

American cultural imagination. This humanitarian argument for deinstitutionalization helped to

make it more popular. But as would later be seen, the neoliberal economic drivers behind

deinstitutionalization meant that the rights of mental patients were no longer its main goal. This

also led to a lack of alternative sources of care or support for people who would have been

committed, which would have been prioritized if patient rights had really been the force behind

deinstitutionalization. Many of these people were left with nowhere to go, and have arguably

suffered more after deinstitutionalization as they have been redirected to the criminal justice

system. (Slate et al. 2013)

Links to Contemporary Mass Incarceration

Immediately following the dismantling of mental institutions and other welfare mechanisms in

the economic crises of the 70’s, the new directive of government “materialised as the integument
of the prison industrial complex,” as the US government could always maintain legitimacy as

long as it centered its ideology on defence. (Gilmore 1999, 178). Gilmore argues that the

legitimacy of state spending was easier to maintain when the narrative was about crime and

safety rather than caring for the mentally disabled. The late 1970’s were a time of great income

instability for many Americans, which led to economic anxiety (Jacobs & Hacker 2008). In

response, political rhetoric tended to focus on fear and danger, and the law and order that would

be used to fight it. Ronald Reagan famously said in 1978 that “inflation is as violent as a mugger,

as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man,” conflating two of the strongest

contemporary political talking points (The Economist 2008). This period marks the beginning of

a drastic rise in incarceration as anxieties about social upheaval and the recession were funnelled

into fear of crime (The Sentencing Project). The government cracked down on crime with

harsher policing and sentencing practices, and mass incarceration began as a cycle where the

state and the prison industrial complex reproduced and legitimated each other. Historically, there

is a statistical trend between the closing of mental institutions and the expansion of prisons (The

Sentencing Project) (Rembis 2014). This can be explained qualitatively by the concept of a

criminalization of madness​: “As state hospitals emptied, and many closed their doors

permanently, both former patients and the newly mad increasingly found themselves alone and

on the street or holed up…. At the same time, [people] began fashioning policies and programs

designed to segregate, isolate, and in many cases criminalize behaviors that in earlier decades or

other settings may not have warranted legal or judicial intervention” (Rembis 2014, 144).

Demographic data shows that “as public psychiatric hospitals closed, arrest and crime rates

increased” (149). In the state of New York in 1973, there were 93,000 state hospital patients and
12,500 in prisons. By 2000, there were only 5,000 in those hospitals compared to 72,000

imprisoned (150). The numbers demonstrate a demographic shift from mental institutions into

prisons. As asylums were shut down, the criminal justice system and its prisons began to take on

the institutional role of taking care of the mentally ill.

This criminalization of undesirable populations in this time period hearkens back to black

convict labor of the Reconstruction era South and the incarceration of Native populations and

hoboes in the early development of Los Angeles (Davis 2006) (Hernandez 2017). In the South

after the Civil War, Black Codes criminalized simple behaviors like vagrancy and absence from

work, but were exclusively enforced on formerly enslaved black populations. Their state of being

was made illegal, and so “they were divested of their status as slaves in order to be accorded a

new status as criminals” (Davis 2006, 363). Criminalization of black life served the dual

purposes of labor exploitation and racial segregation. On the other side of the country, some of

the first laws passed in California “targeted Native peoples for arrest, incarceration, and forms of

convict labor” as drunk and vagrancy codes were selectively enforced against Native men, whose

culture and presence was seen as disruptive to the white settler colonial values of the new state

(Hernandez 2017, 36). The state responded similarly when poor white hobo laborers began to

flow seasonally into Los Angeles in the late 1800’s. The city’s “elites and authorities marshalled

the eliminatory possibilities of imprisonment on public order charges, structurally confining

‘tramps’ and ‘hobos’” in order to insulate their “idyllic community of middle-class white

families” (63). In these situations outsider populations were criminalized and eliminated through

the criminal justice system. As mental health institutions were dismantled in the United States
with the alleged goal of liberating the mentally ill, the criminal justice system came through to

replace their role of elimination through incarceration for many of the most vulnerable

individuals that had been cast out by deinstitutionalization.

The results of this institutional shift have been disastrous. Los Angeles County Jail, Rikers Island

Jail in New York, and Cook County Jail in Chicago are “the three largest inpatient psychiatric

facilities in the country… [each hold] more persons with mental illnesses than any psychiatric

institution in the United States” (Rembis 2014, 139). Whereas mental institutions were

problematic due to medical ethics and lack of proper treatment, deinstitutionalization has led

many mentally ill people into a downward cycle of incarceration and recidivism: in 2005 “nearly

a quarter of state prisoners and jail inmates with a mental health problem, compared to a fifth of

those without, had served three or more prior incarcerations” (Ben-Moshe 2014, 13). Both

institutionalization and deinstitutionalization in mental healthcare in the United States have led to

similar outcomes for the mentally ill population, creating a sort of double bind likely to lead to

prison-like conditions either way. This population has been historically caught between two

nightmarish scenarios. “Nightmare #1 envisions innocent patients forcibly incarcerated in a

mental institution and held there by the ignorance, arrogance, or personal pique of the staff.

“Nightmare #2 “envisions seriously disturbed (even if not ‘dangerous’) patients, helpless, unable

to feed, clothe, or care for themselves, and left to languish on the streets,” often ending up in

prison as carceral institutions have become the prevalent destination for such dispossessed

people (Ward 2014, 278).

The connections between mass incarceration and mental illness intersect with race as well in the

modern United States. More black men began to be diagnosed with schizophrenia just as both

black and mentally ill populations were increasingly incarcerated: “Beginning in the 1960’s

schizophrenia went from being a label applied largely to middle-class white housewives to being

a ‘violent social disease’ attributed primarily to black men” (Rembis 2014, 145). The labelling of

danger on both black men and schizophrenics targeted a population already especially vulnerable

to incarceration. The conflation of mental health and race in this case shows that both blackness

and mental illness were seen as indicators of violence and criminality. Today, both mentally ill

and black populations are severely overrepresented in prison populations (Sabol et al. 2007)

(James 2006). A 2015 report by the National Center for Health Statistics found that compared

with white men, hispanic and black men were less likely to report depression and anxiety.

Among those who did report these issues, a lower proportion of black and hispanic men sought

treatment for the disorders than white men (Blumberg 2015). This shows a disparity in access to

mental health treatment between ethnic groups in America. Race serves as a barrier to mental

health treatment, and people of color struggling with mental health are the most vulnerable to

incarceration as their mental illness is most likely to be criminalized.

Abolitionist Futures & Conclusion

Throughout the history of the United States, the mentally ill have been subjected to punitive and

disciplinary techniques closely associated with prison, whether in psychiatric or carceral

institutions. In seeking possible alternatives for mental treatment, we can draw inspiration from

prison abolition movements. Abolitionism, which seeks to do away with all forms of

incarceration and replace them with alternative ways to prevent and remedy harm, is usually
focused on criminal justice and prison elimination (Davis 2006). Deinstitutionalization was, and

still is, associated with abolitionist movements and their rhetoric about liberation. However,

because the strongest drivers of deinstitutionalization in the 20th century were not abolitionist,

but neoliberal, the actual shift to community clinics that has taken place remains punitive. That is

because the strongest drivers of deinstitutionalization in the 20th century were not abolitionist,

but neoliberal. Rather than focusing on freedom and support for mental patients, the push shut

down mental institutions strove for “increased privatization of penalty and health care,” which

led to “not the decline of segregation [of the mentally ill], but its intensification through other

means” (Ben-Moshe et al. 2014, 268). Stripping down asylums and abandoning patients in need

of support in order to privatize healthcare was harmful for these people, even if closing down

mental institutions could have been a step in the direction of abolition. In efforts to apply

abolitionism to mental healthcare, it is important to work through both positive and negative

abolitionist methods--deinstitutionalization was a measure of ​negative​ abolition in that it

dismantled structures that confined the mentally ill, but there was no movement of ​positive

abolition, which involves building more free and equitable ways to prevent and remedy harm

without the oppressive functions of prisons. In the absence of support from positive abolitionist

movements, many mentally ill people who might have gone to asylums instead became homeless

or went to prison. Ben-Moshe (2014) argues that in order to advance the goal of abolition,

deinstitutionalization needs to be approached as a philosophy rather than just a political or

historical process (245). It should borrow more from the movement of anti-psychiatry, which

seeks to dismantle the hierarchies of power in healthcare and empower patients in matters of

their own mental health. Abolitionism in mental healthcare also means reframing concepts like
treatment, recovery a​ nd even ​disability,​ in a way that empowers people in matters of their mental

health. For example, a discussion of mental ​recovery​ implies a state of ​normality​ in mental

health, which sends a message that mental patients are in a way inferior to “normal” people,

opening doors to institutionalization, paternalization, and unequal power dynamics. A reframing

of ​recovery​ could mean allowing individuals to take more agency in their own emotional and

mental lives. Even the term ​mentally ill,​ which I have used extensively in this essay, carries

alienating and patronizing connotations that suggest helplessness and inferiority in its objects.

Conceptual reframing works toward deconstruction of our ideas of ​disability​ and gives more

agency and independence to all people regardless of mental state. This independence does not

necessarily mean that mentally disabled people who want help should live without any; instead it

means giving them the support and autonomy to make decisions regarding their own care. In an

abolitionist future, this support can come from a better-integrated community. Abolitionism

already relies on community autonomy for many of its goals, such as community mediation in

justice as an alternative to institutionalized incarceration (Davis 2006). The response of the

community to mental health issues should be decided by people who actually understand and live

with the patients, rather than a rigid and hierarchical healthcare system.

The United States was founded around the time that Western society began to differentiate

mental illness from other kinds of social deviance and develop new methods for its treatment.

The establishment of early religious mental asylums signified a turn in objective from pure

confinement to the institutionalized normalization in treatment of the mentally ill. Whereas the

mentally ill had historically been cast out from “rational” society, they were now taken in by
powerful hierarchical institutions in an effort to reform their behavior, a process parallel, yet

separate from, the development of prisons to deal with crime. These oppressive asylums were

then dismantled in the 20th century, partially for the “liberation” of patients, but perhaps more so

because of a wide social and economic dismantling of social welfare institutions with the rise of

neoliberalism. With a lack of social support for the mentally ill, the criminal justice system again

stepped in as a measure to confine and control unsupported individuals deemed mentally unfit

for society. Overall, a historical pattern emerges where the mentally ill were lumped in with

criminals, then separated out but treated in parallel ways, and now are being pulled back into the

criminal justice system. This is not to suggest that history is a cycle that can only repeat itself.

An abolitionist future would envision community integration and the deconstruction of

incarceratory institutions as ways of dealing with both physical crime/harm and mental illness,

giving more support and autonomy to the people and communities that these issues affect most

severely.
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