Prisons, Asylums, and the Public: Institutional Visiting in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Janet Miron’s book counters the traditional historiographical view that visitors to nineteenth-century institutions were a monolithic group of ignorant voyeurs seeking their own thrills at the expense of confined populations. The focus is on prisons and asylums in nineteenth-century Ontario, New York State, and Philadelphia. Miron argues that a good number of casual lay visitors saw asylums and prisons as embodying reformist efforts to ‘cure’ mad people and rehabilitate convicts. Their visits, far from being merely nosy ventures by prurient outsiders, were attempts to understand and participate in debates about the place of the ‘other’ in society. Miron argues that while voyeurism was always part of the tourist gaze within asylums and prisons, it was only part of a story that too many historians have missed, one in which visitors sought to expand discussions on insanity and criminality beyond the officials who operated these facilities. Her use of sources to uncover this history goes beyond institutional records and expands into travel narratives, memoirs, tour guides, newspapers, and postcards in what is a rigorously researched study of available primary sources.

Tours by laypeople reached their height of popularity and continued unabated until the end of the 1800s, even at places where outsiders were less than welcome by administrators. The pressure to allow visits by laypeople who felt it was their right to tour publicly funded asylums and prisons, and the related need for public support, is ably discussed, along with officials’ conflicting ideas about the impact of such visits on inmates. Miron places these developments within the context of expanding leisure for the white middle class, who were the primary visitors. The power imbalance was particularly glaring in that visitors had a choice, unlike confined populations who had no choice about being gazed upon by outsiders. Of immense importance is Miron’s discussion on limitations of visits in which tours were selectively conducted and visitors ‘were not necessarily seeing inmates and patients in their normal, everyday state’ (83). Equally important are the responses of confined people to visitors. Though limited by a general lack of first-person accounts by inmates, Miron expertly uses recorded responses to visitors from the people they saw to show how confined populations interacted with and could also challenge those around them. While confined people had no choice in their subject status, they did have a degree of choice in how to interact, though this too was significantly limited if they wanted to avoid punishment for being too outspoken. Miron is careful to point out that visitors could cause great distress to confined people, ranging from cruelties inflicted on inmates, gawking, and the fact that visits, in spite of all the hubris about being based on supposedly enlightened principles, veryoften did nothing to improve the condition of inmates. More often than not, visitors believed what they saw and did not critique tours as being selectively biased in what they were shown.

Visiting prisons and asylums is placed in a wider context of world fairs and industrial exhibitions and how ‘institutional tourism fit very comfortably within this culture of exhibition and spectacle’ (123). This could be rationalized as ‘educational’ (128) in that ‘what was considered deviant enabled visitors to define themselves against others’ (130). Self-improvement and social betterment through the tourist gaze was a basis underlying this practice, even though objectified stares were ever-present for people on the receiving end.

Miron notes that visiting declined by the early twentieth century, when asylums and prisons were much more part of the accepted landscape and were not as in need of public support for their continued existence. Wardens and superintendents were eager to reassert their authority as to who could and could not enter institutions, especially among more clinically minded doctors in asylums who focused less on social interpretations of madness and more on bio-medical theories that did not need visitors to legitimate their practice.

Moreover...