Institutional Confinement Research Articles

General Election Debates – Problems and Solutions

Pre-election debates are one of the most important steps in the electoral process – indeed, they serve an important public interest as they inform the American public about the issues of the day and offer a forum by which candidate proposed solutions may be heard. However, pre-election debates are led by moderators who generally do not have expertise in many of their key topic areas, such as law or judicial studies; and because of this, the propositions and arguments made by candidates in the pre-election time may be de-contextualized during debates such that the voting public may be misled in terms of the practicality of candidate positions. It is not unusual for individuals to unwittingly make propositions which insufficiently account for the confines of governmental structures, norms, and institutions in important ways. Likewise, it is not expectable for candidate to have absolute expertise in all areas of the debate, such as from health care to international law. This presents a real and pressing problem or issue for the quality of debates and democracy. It would be useful for pre-election debates to have additional facilitators present to provide basic factual and scientific information, as well to define key terms and principles relevant to American government and political life. Thus, given the current format of pre-election debates, this policy brief offers proposals to increase voter awareness and thus strengthen American democracy through amendments to the pre-election debate format for general elections.

Parramatta Female Factory Precinct as a Site of Conscience: Using Institutional Pasts to Shape Just Legal Futures

Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Association through its Memory Project is activating PFFP as Australia’s first officially recognised Site of Conscience. Through the Memory Project, survivors of Parramatta Girls Home are using art practices and social history to disrupt dominant, official narratives that have silenced their experiences, to put their memories of the Home into action and to prevent future injustices of institutionalisation. For law students and legal practitioners the work of Parragirls through the Memory Project offers possibilities for confronting the complicity of Australian legal systems and legal actors in the harms and injustices of institutional confinement. It provides examples and new methods to direct them towards practices of collective ethical accountability in order to shaping more just future legal frameworks of institutional confinement. In support of this argument the article discusses a recent collaboration between the authors to engage law students in the Precinct through an excursion to the site.

Bridging hospitality education and community

Bridging hospitality education and community

You Can’t Go Outside: Involuntary Hospitalization and Access to the Outdoors in Health Care

<p>This paper will explore the practice of withholding a person’s access to the outdoors while under involuntary hospitalization, or civil commitment, in the province of Ontario, Canada. Following a question from the author’s clinical practice, the paper asks: Are we denying mental health patients a right that is protected for prisoners?<br />An overview of the structure of the Canadian legal system and the role of international human rights law in local legislation is offered to situate lack of outdoor access under civil commitment in a broad legal context. The intention of legal and ethical positions described in human rights and mental health law will be considered in light of how these support or negate current practices in health care. Key issues of civil commitment will be defined. Law and policy governing outdoor access in other institutions such as prisons and detention centers will be outlined as a point of comparison.</p><p><br />The purpose of this paper is to serve as a guide to thinking through the issue of institutional confinement without access to the outdoors when a person’s independent freedom of movement is compromised, legally or otherwise. Should there be future interest in challenging this practice, this paper will be useful as a primer for how to approach legislation and institutional policy.</p><p><br />Key words: Canadian legal system; Mental Health Act (1990); Ontario; Deprivation of liberty; Ultra vires; Human rights; Psychiatric nursing; Hospital design; Outdoor spaces; Fresh air; Patient rights; Civil commitment</p>

Universities, Unjust Law, and Campus Sanctuaries

This essay examines the campus sanctuary movement that launched in response to the 2016 US presidential election. It focuses on the case of my employer to illuminate the broader context of the campus sanctuary movement's nationwide emergence, including the neoliberal evisceration of higher education and right-wing attacks on intellectual freedom and demands for social justice. Recognizing that the institution will not save us, sanctuary organizers not only demand that institutions use their resources for the public good, but they also work beyond the confines of institutions to build the resources that we need through community-based organizations.

Deviant Motherhood

This article discusses two intertwined forms of care that engage with incarcerated women in Argentina. First, it examines the consequences of a policy change that allows incarcerated women who are pregnant and/or caregivers of small children to serve their time at home. Institutional confinement extends beyond the prison and has taken various forms, such as the shelter, the asylum, relocation centers, and prison camps. Inspired by recent prison studies that disrupt the prison as a fixed and hardened site, this article contends that house arrest is far from a benefit. Rather, home confinement constitutes a site of neglect where women must fend for themselves to perform reproductive labor as a way to complete their sentence. This practice reveals new forms of social control and state surveillance in which judges, social workers, and penitentiaries determine which women are appropriate for house arrest while policing the terms of their confinement. Second, this article presents the author’s fieldwork involving a women’s collective that offers art-related workshops to encourage incarcerated women to develop a different understanding of their agency and potential. Institutions such as neighborhood and women’s collectives offer new forms of sociality that redefine imprisonment. As women under house arrest are expected to provide for themselves and their children, it is important to understand how they meet such challenges, considering how gender norms and institutional violence impact women’s lives today.

Falling Short: The State’s Role in Workplace Safety and Health

The state plays a major role in occupational safety and health in the United States, impacting all aspects including resources, training, research, standard setting, and enforcement. Howard Waitzkin has challenged public health activists to rethink their understanding of the State and to replace the dominant pluralist view with a conception that serves as the theory for more effective public health action to improve the health of working people. This paper is a response to Waitzkin’s challenge utilizing a framework that views the State as a reflection of the relationship and power dynamics between capital and labor, within the confines of institutions, policies, and laws organized to protect and maintain the capitalist system. A historical review of safety and health since the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 in the context of the capitalist state serves as the basis for suggestions as to how this might shape safety and health advocates’ strategy.

Immoral Habits: Delinquent White Girls in 1920s Cape Town and the Distribution of Blame

ABSTRACT In much recent historical writing on the history of South African child welfare considerable emphasis has been placed on the poor white problem. The development of child welfare is typically seen as part of the wider project to uplift so-called ‘poor whites’. This article builds on this literature by focusing on one particular aspect of South African child welfare work – the attempt to discipline ‘uncontrollable’ youth. Case histories pertaining to out-of-control young people, I argue, reveal the intensity of the public antipathy towards adolescent female sexuality. This was not only a problem of ‘miscegenation’ or interracial sex. Case histories show how evidence of female sexuality was constructed in the day-to-day – by child welfare agents, state officials, community members and families themselves. Together, these voices worked to distribute blame. Interested parties drew on prevailing eugenicist ideas around mental weakness and moral aberration but these were filtered through a more impressionistic, common-sense vernacular that described how girls looked, what they wore, how they behaved and who they knew. As often as blame was located with bad mothers and bad homes, it was also directed at girls themselves, leading in many cases to long-term institutional confinement.

Business Rationale for Linked Data at Governments: A Case Study at the Netherlands’ Kadaster Data Platform

Linked Data is an innovative approach for publishing heterogeneous data sources on the web. As such, it can transcend the traditional confines of separate databases, as well as the confines of separate institutions. At the same time, businesses and governmental organizations alike are trying to cope with ever-increasing quantities of heterogeneous data that must be used across multiple departments, manufacturing locations, and governmental bodies. Linked Data would, therefore, be a great technological solution for today's organizational problems. However, we observe that a serious gap exists between Linked Data research and business research. While Linked Data research is almost exclusively technologically oriented, the business research literature has not devoted much attention to the use of Linked Data solutions yet. In this paper, we seek to bridge this gap, by introducing a real-world use case where Linked Data technologies are applied in large-scale government settings. We argue in detail that Linked Data provides a major contribution to the business vision of a modern governmental institution based on the experience of the Netherlands' Cadastre Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster), so far, the largest implementation of Linked Data in the governments of the Netherlands.

Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910, by Catharine Coleborne

Book Review

Punitiveness Beyond Criminal Justice: Punishable and Punitive Subjects in an Era of Prevention, Anti-Migration and Austerity

AbstractThis article advances a holistic conceptualization of punitiveness that acknowledges its complexity and contemporary social and political pervasiveness. We argue that punitiveness is best understood as a phenomenological complex operating at a personal, symbolic, political and structural level, which borrows from, but extrapolates the confines of criminal justice institutions. The article examines limitations in articulations of punitiveness in criminological scholarship, and then draws on three contemporary case studies to investigate how the political deployment of anxieties and hostilities around the ‘crises’ of prevention, anti-migration and austerity reveal and reproduce punitive logics. It then outlines an original conceptual framework to argue that punitiveness ultimately revolves around the construction of, and dynamics between, punitive and punishable subjects.

Medicaid's Institutions for Mental Diseases (IMD) Exclusion Rule: A Policy Debate-Argument to Retain the IMD Rule.

Medicaid's Institutions for Mental Diseases (IMD) Exclusion Rule: A Policy Debate-Argument to Retain the IMD Rule.

'They Keep it All Hid': The Ghettoization of Mental Disability Law and its Implications for Legal Education

The Supreme Court has, since 1972, decided more than fifty cases involving persons with disabilities, a docket spanning virtually every aspect of constitutional and criminal procedure. These cases have dealt with the substantive and procedural limitations on the commitment power, the conditions of confinement in psychiatric institutions, the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act to persons institutionalized because of illness, the substantive and procedural aspects of the criminal incompetency inquiry and the insanity defense, the relationship between disability and sexually violent predator laws, and aspects of the death penalty. Thousands of cases have been decided in every state in the nation dealing with similar issues. In fact, in the Supreme Court’s first modern disability case – finding that the due process clause is implicated in decisions related to both the nature and duration of the commitment process – it expressed surprise that there were not more disability cases brought to its attention.However, a study of constitutional law, criminal procedure, civil rights and/or federal courts casebooks reveal virtually no disability cases. Policies and practices of exclusion are not unique. By way of example, more than a decade ago, Toni Massaro pointed out that constitutional criminal procedure has been treated as a subject separate from basic constitutional materials and courses. Mental disability has been ghettoized in the same way that criminal procedure has been ghettoized. It is a ghettoization that in some ways is far more troubling than the criminal procedure ghettoization, since schools offer courses in basic criminal procedure, and these courses are regularly well-subscribed. On the other hand, there are courses in mental disability law offered only at about half of American schools, and, at many schools, those courses are offered infrequently and only by adjuncts (who often have no legal training). This ghettoization reflects a hard truth that has passed under the radar of most civil rights teachers and civil rights students. Mental disability is simply not a topic taken seriously as a civil rights topic (or as a constitutional topic or as a federal courts topic). And this failure of inclusion goes directly to the heart of the challenge of teaching disability law. It is hidden (nearly totally hidden) from the traditional school curriculum. It is not in the curriculum at many schools. It is largely invisible to students and professors alike.I believe this ghettoization is a reflection of the invidious sanism that permeates the legal academy in the same way it permeates the rest of society. Law teachers are not immune to sanism – an irrational prejudice of the same quality and character of other irrational prejudices that cause (and are reflected in) prevailing social attitudes of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnic bigotry.In this essay, I reconsider this ghettoization from four overlapping vantage points. First, I consider how mental disability law became a part of the school curriculum, growing out of and largely supplanting courses in psychiatry and the law (and why this title change is not just a question of phraseology). Second, I discuss the significance of the notion that mental disability law can be cabined in one 2- or 3-credit course (implying that all disability can be surveyed in that period of time, in a way that school faculty would never think all tax or real estate or securities could be so taught), and the significance of the reality that so many schools offer no course or only one course sporadically (often, without any involvement of a full-time faculty member). Third, I examine the Online Mental Disability Law program at New York Law School (where I teach) from four different perspectives: (a) the pedagogy, (b) the range of subject matters taught, (c) the interdisciplinarity of the students and the faculty, and (d) the internationality of the students and intersectionality of our course offerings. Finally, and most importantly, I explain why it is absolutely essential for any disability course (or sequence of courses) to consider the concepts of sanism and pretextuality, the significance of ordinary common sense (OCS) and heuristic reasoning, and the impact of therapeutic jurisprudence.

Pop-Up Art and the Aesthetics of Assembly

This article considers the phenomenon of pop-up practice as a medium of public art and collective assembly. I argue for the pedagogical potential of the research-creation pop-up to situate aesthetic contributions as relevant and necessary to broader public discourse. Discussing a series of case studies developed through the Mobile Art Studio, a transitory creative lab space that I founded in 2014, I consider how the pop-up becomes the vehicle for brief, carnivalesque transformations of institutional settings toward critical ends. The pop-up’s performative assemblies open up provisional and contingent understandings between audiences, artists, and participants. What remains from them is the memory of a lived, embodied experience of knowledge production and translation outside traditional institutional confines. The article speaks to the pop-up as a pedagogical and research-creation tool; throughout, I explore the possibilities for resistance offered by the pop-up within the spatial and temporal contexts of late capitalism.

Stela do Patrocínio e a poética da clausura

resumo Este artigo tem como objetivo abordar enquanto objeto literário a fala poética de Stela do Patrocínio, diagnosticada como esquizofrênica e mantida em clausura institucional entre 1962 e 1992. Para isto, temos como base o livro Reino dos bichos e dos animais é o meu nome, no qual a filósofa Viviane Mosé transcreve em versos as falas de Stela, gravadas por sua resistência em lidar com tintas e papéis em um projeto desenvolvido pela artista plástica Neli Gutmacher. O artigo se divide em duas seções. A primeira se dedica à biografia de Stela e à própria condição da clausura como origem das falas poéticas. A segunda se detém em abordar as falas como textos e a refletir sobre o encontro entre loucura e poesia. Essa poesia que emerge de uma voz marginalizada pela instituição surpreende e nos desafia pela forma como organiza esteticamente a percepção que a poeta tem de si como objeto dentro do discurso médico.

Arrested Development: Pursuing a Higher Education in Carceral Contexts

Engaging in pro-social activities such as postsecondary education during incarceration can help to transform offenders and move them in noncriminal directions. This article explores the process of beginning carceral higher education, drawing from interviews with 34 formerly incarcerated individuals who completed postsecondary classes at various state correctional facilities. It also discusses the participants’ readiness for change and changing perspectives experienced during incarceration. The study documents the value of carceral developments in shaping alternative pathways to crime and the role of contextual factors related to institutional confinement, higher education, and antithetical subcultural norms.

Invisible networked publics and hidden contention: Youth activism and social media tactics under repression

Social media create new channels for young people to engage with civic and political issues outside the confines of traditional public institutions. While social media present new opportunities for youth who were previously excluded from formal channels of political participation, increasingly, these platforms also subject youth to surveillance, censorship, and other forms of repression. In this study, I examine digitally active, young civic actors in Cambodia, an authoritarian regime with a demographic youth bulge and rapidly increasing uptake of social media. Specifically, I focus on social media tactics employed by youth to navigate contentious politics and express dissent under state control and surveillance. The findings show how young activists rely heavily on hidden tactics to exert influence on public issues using social media in highly contentious, high-risk political climates. This study offers insights into the dynamics of digitally mediated civic action and state power situated in broader social, cultural contexts.

Patient Privacy in the Era of Big Data.

Privacy was defined as a fundamental human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the 1948 United Nations General Assembly. However, there is still no consensus on what constitutes privacy. In this review, we look at the evolution of privacy as a concept from the era of Hippocrates to the era of social media and big data. To appreciate the modern measures of patient privacy protection and correctly interpret the current regulatory framework in the United States, we need to analyze and understand the concepts of individually identifiable information, individually identifiable health information, protected health information, and de-identification. The Privacy Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act defines the regulatory framework and casts a balance between protective measures and access to health information for secondary (scientific) use. The rule defines the conditions when health information is protected by law and how protected health information can be de-identified for secondary use. With the advents of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, computational text de-identification algorithms produce de-identified results nearly as well as those produced by human experts, but much faster, more consistently and basically for free. Modern clinical text de-identification systems now pave the road to big data and enable scientists to access de-identified clinical information while firmly protecting patient privacy. However, clinical text de-identification is not a perfect process. In order to maximize the protection of patient privacy and to free clinical and scientific information from the confines of electronic healthcare systems, all stakeholders, including patients, health institutions and institutional review boards, scientists and the scientific communities, as well as regulatory and law enforcement agencies must collaborate closely. On the one hand, public health laws and privacy regulations define rules and responsibilities such as requesting and granting only the amount of health information that is necessary for the scientific study. On the other hand, developers of de-identification systems provide guidelines to use different modes of operations to maximize the effectiveness of their tools and the success of de-identification. Institutions with clinical repositories need to follow these rules and guidelines closely to successfully protect patient privacy. To open the gates of big data to scientific communities, healthcare institutions need to be supported in their de-identification and data sharing efforts by the public, scientific communities, and local, state, and federal legislators and government agencies.

Respecting young people’s informal learning: Circumventing strategic policy evasions

This paper explores experiences at the interface of research and policy through the lens of informal learning. The paper contends that in order to further social justice it is essential to value the informal learning that takes place outside the confines of educational institutions. However, it also demonstrates the difficulties in getting policymakers to take this issue seriously. Formal education, in its fixity around the neo-liberal human subject, will inevitably reproduce the values and assumptions that have created an unequal society in the first place. To achieve social change, what constitutes learning and where and how it happens must be rethought. The paper reflects on three research studies – two achieved, one imagined – which help to reveal the extent and nature of young white working-class informal learning. These findings challenge their positioning as abject, deficit and hating learning. It discusses the policy interest in these studies and the current move of white working-class masculinity to the centre of political debate. It argues that despite the nominal attention to such working-class lives, their informal learning was and is deflected and ignored by policymakers. It is not a question of educating policymakers better, but that policy actively chooses this blinkered stance because a shadow body of unrecognised informal learners helps to shore up the status of their privileged qualified peers. The paper concludes that rather than pursuing familiar research pathways, partnership working and micro levels of research combined with alternative forms of communication and agitation may better serve to support young people’s own fight for social justice.

Lives in the Asylum Record, 1864 to 1910: Utilising Large Data Collection for Histories of Psychiatry and Mental Health.

This article examines the research implications and uses of data for a large project investigating institutional confinement in Australia and New Zealand. The cases of patients admitted between 1864 and 1910 at four separate institutions, three public and one private, provided more than 4000 patient records to a collaborative team of researchers. The utility and longevity of this data and the ways to continue to understand its significance and contents form the basis of this article’s interrogation of data collection and methodological issues surrounding the history of psychiatry and mental health. It examines the themes of ethics and access, record linkage, categories of data analysis, comparison and record keeping across colonial and imperial institutions, and constraints and opportunities in the data itself. The aim of this article is to continue an ongoing conversation among historians of mental health about the role and value of data collection for mental health and to signal the relevance of international multi-sited collaborative research in this field.