Abstract
SummaryThis article explores the relationship between the prison and mental illness, focusing on the ways in which the system of separate confinement was associated with mental breakdown and how maintaining the integrity of prison discipline mitigated against prisoners obtaining treatment or removal to an asylum. Examples are taken from English and Irish prisons, from the introduction of separate confinement at Pentonville Prison in London in 1842 until the late nineteenth century, exploring the persistence of the system of separation in the face of evidence that it was harming the minds of prisoners. The article also briefly examines the ways in which prison doctors argued that they were dealing with special categories of prisoner, adept at feigning, intrinsically weak-minded and whose mental deterioration was embedded in their criminality, factors that served to reinforce the harmful environment for mentally ill prisoners.
Highlights
Confinement as Administered at the PentonvillePrison (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans; reprinted New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), 93. 31Fifth RCGPP, 1847 [818], Report of the Commissioners, 12, Chaplain’s Report, 41–2
This article explores the relationship between the prison and mental illness, focusing on the ways in which the system of separate confinement was associated with mental breakdown and how maintaining the integrity of prison discipline mitigated against prisoners obtaining treatment or removal to an asylum
The article briefly examines the ways in which prison doctors argued that they were dealing with special categories of prisoner, adept at feigning, intrinsically weakminded and whose mental deterioration was embedded in their criminality, factors that served to reinforce the harmful environment for mentally ill prisoners
Summary
Prison (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans; reprinted New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), 93. 31Fifth RCGPP, 1847 [818], Report of the Commissioners, 12, Chaplain’s Report, 41–2. Dr Rees was unconvinced, insisting that Lees ‘is better, and that his mental symptoms are decidedly shammed, & that, the Prisoner does not deny the fact, when accused’.34 His case came up again, in June 1846, when the assistant schoolmaster reported him to the governor, medical officer and chaplain, as ‘wholly unfit for the discipline of the Prison’ following remarks the convict had made suggesting ‘he is either out of his mind or, pretending to be so’. This case again illuminates how records of the day-to-day running of Pentonville contrast starkly with the limited attention played to mental illness in the Commissioners’ published reports.. [1958], xxvi, 39. 65Burt, Results of the System of Separate Confinement, preface, ix–x. 66Ibid., 89. 67Ibid., 91. 68Ibid., 106
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