Dr. Anne Parsons will discuss her new book From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945.
Thursday, October 25th, 5:30-7 pm, Greensboro Project Art Space
To many, asylums are a relic of a bygone era. State governments took steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in psychiatric hospitals, and many mental health facilities closed down. Yet, as Anne Parsons reveals, the asylum did not die during deinstitutionalization. Instead, it returned in the prison industrial complex as the government shifted to a more punitive, institutional approach to social deviance. Parsons shows how the lack of community-based services, fear-based politics around mental illness, and the economics of institutions meant that closing mental hospitals fed a cycle of incarceration that became an epidemic.
Sponsored by Greensboro Project Space and the UNCG Department of History. Refreshments will be provided.
