[On October 27th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ll AmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]
On the groundbreaking
and inspiring activist who changed both prisons and mental health treatment,
and from whom we still have a lot to learn.
In
March 1841, a thirty-nine-year-old teacher and social worker named Dorothea
Dix visited East Cambridge Jail in Massachusetts. She was there to teach a
Sunday School class for female prisoners, but what immediately and entirely
drew her attention were the conditions in which all of the inmates—but most
egregiously, to her sensitive perspective, the mentally ill and disabled, who
were held there not because they had necessarily committed a crime but because
the facility doubled as an asylum, as almost all American prisons in the era
did—were held. Among other things, the facility was entirely unheated and had
been kept that way throughout the New England winter; when Dix inquired about
this policy, she was told that “the insane do not feel heat or cold” (a frustratingly ubiquitous
belief at the time).
That falsehood represents just
the tip of a very sizeable iceberg of misinformation that constituted the vast,
vast majority of public and even medical thinking about the mentally ill in the
first half of the 19th century. But Dix was not one to accept
conventional or traditional wisdom, no matter how widespread or entrenched it
might be. She took it upon herself to visit
virtually all of the state’s jails and almshouses (the latter a more
charitable but often no more suitable space in which the mentally ill were
housed), talked at length with all those who worked in them as well as (when
she could) some of those who were housed there, and wrote up incredibly
detailed and thorough notes on the eerily similar conditions she observed
throughout her travels; she turned those notes
into a document for the
Massachusetts legislature, and won as a result a significant state outlay
of funds to expand
the Worcester State Hospital and make it into a much more appropriate home
for the state’s mentally ill wards.
That successful journey was only
the beginning of an epic quest that would encompass much of Dix’s remaining forty-odd years of
life; she would eventually travel across every state east of the
Mississippi and even numerous European nations, visiting facilities constantly
and working tirelessly to improve conditions in those facilities, to advocate
for the opening of better facilities, and, perhaps most significantly, to
change fundamentally the way society viewed these individuals and communities. Dix once wrote,
as evidence for why she knew that many can be “raised from these base
conditions,” of a young woman who “was for years ‘a raging maniac’ chained in a
cage and whipped to control her acts and words. She was helped by a husband and
wife who agreed to take care of her in their home and slowly she recovered her
senses.” This woman represents only one individual among the untold millions
who were positively influenced by Dix’s work and perspective, but of course
even one individual’s live so radically changed for the better is a significant
achievement; to contemplate how many people around the world were given the
opportunity to go from unheated cages and brutal beatings to sensitive care and
treatment by Dix’s efforts is to truly understand how much one inspiring
American can do and transform in a life’s work.
Yet as much good
as Dix’s efforts accomplished, it would do her memory no honor to pretend that
we have adequately shifted our perception or, most importantly, our social and
communal treatment of the mentally ill; a late 20th century text
like One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest highlights (in fictional but not at all
inaccurate form) just how far from desirable our mental institutions often
remain. The definition of insanity, the phrase goes, lies in doing the same
thing over and over again and expecting different results. Dorothea Dix’s
redefinitions are still, it seems, very much needed. Next prison story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d
highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment