Customer Reviews

The Discovery of the Asylum (New Lines in Criminology)

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I really enjoyed reading this book, though it did take me a while to read through it. Rothman advances an argument to explain why America turned to instituionalization of different classes of people during the Jacksonian period. His basic thesis is that medical elites feared the growing democratization of American society and therefore advanced the idea that institutionalization could make unproductive citizens productive and simletaneously serve as a model for the rest of the society.

In Rothman's model, the "Discovery of the Asylum" was both a progressive and deeply conservative event. This conflict is never resolved, and was ultimately at the root of the great failure of the rehabilative model of insitutionalization in the post civil war period. Rothman persuaively argues that by the 1880's, the idea that individuals could be rehabilitated by the process of instituionalization had been abandoned in favor of a "custodial" model.

Rothman looks at the examples of poor houses, pentientaries, orphanages and insane asylums to explicate his thesis.

Fans of Foucault's "Discipline and Punishment", Goffman's "Asylums" and Sykes "The Society of Captives" should find this book enthralling.

Highly recommended

David Rothman's history of the American asylum is among the best historical accounts of all of America's major institutions of confinement. Rothman uses the model of the asylum-as it was conceived and developed by Kirkbride, as a model for confinement in the 19th century in general. By tracing the elaborate histories of asylums, penitentiaries, almshouses, and reformatories, Rothman paints a critical picture of American psychiatry. An indispensable resource for anyone interested institutional genealogy of our major institutions of confinement.