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

The opening decades of the nineteenth century, in both the United States and Canada, witnessed the extraordinary building of asylums and prisons. Citizens took great pride in these caretaker and custodial institutions, mostly because they exemplified a commitment to cure mental illness and reform criminality. The traditional practice of confining the insane to local jails or attics and punishing felons with stocks, whippings, and the gallows gave way to a new sensibility and confidence that well-ordered institutions could rehabilitate the deviant.

Behind this optimism lay a theory that ascribed deviancy to the excesses of a permissive social order in which neither family nor church nor community adequately governed behaviour. The diagnosis carried an antidote: to isolate the mentally ill and criminal in special, quasi-utopian institutions, reduce or eliminate contact with family and friends, and subject inmates to a daily routine of steady work and bell-ringing punctuality would produce cure and reform.

Janet Miron is thoroughly familiar with the history of these institutions, and her knowledge prompts her to ask whether, in fact, isolation was as complete as theory and administrative regulations would suggest. Wardens and superintendents did ban letters and visits from relatives and neighbours. But curiously, they allowed the general public to tour the facilities. Each year, thousands of citizens visited a mental hospital or prison, an experience that most of us now find puzzling. I have made such visits (in the company of judges or to lecture on the history of confinement to those confined) – but the overwhelming majority of Canadians and Americans have never stepped inside such places and have no desire to do so.

Miron is at her best when providing a social and intellectual frame for understanding such visits. Institutional administrators welcomed the fees that citizens paid to take tours, and some believed that the occasion would heighten the facilities’ reputation. For their part, visitors were intrigued or titillated by what they saw: the mad woman, the convicted murderer. The public was also eager to look behind the institutions’ vast walls and turrets that legislators had so lavishly funded and foreign dignitaries had so generously praised. Perhaps even more important, as Miron shrewdly notes, citizens had few other opportunities to bring novelty into their daily routine. Freak shows and circuses were rare, theatre was considered illegitimate, and amusement parks had not yet appeared. In effect, spectacles were in scant supply, and would–be spectators enjoyed few opportunities. What better way to escape humdrum routines than by eyeing or talking with the mad and the bad?

Miron is less persuasive in arguing that the visits significantly affected public policy, that they were ‘something more than mere gratuitous spectatorship.’ She insists that the visits helped prevent the worst of abuses and ‘fostered popular understanding’ of deviant behaviour. She is surely right that the visits became the occasion to exchange contraband (tobacco and liquor) and maybe even sexual favours; perhaps inmates found satisfaction in sharing their stories of innocence or being railroaded into an asylum. But despite her extensive research, Miron rarely quotes accounts from ordinary citizens to buttress her case. There is little here to support her claim that institutional visiting constituted social involvement. More often than not, the visitors in her accounts gawk and stare, hardly grounds for revising the standing judgment that institutional tours were intrusive and degrading.

Miron closes her book with an account of the disappearance of institutional visiting, gently suggesting that something has been lost. I am less certain of this. In the twentieth–century history of mental hospital and penal reform, it was not lay visitors but the litigators from civil liberties organizations who established the principles of treatment in ‘least restrictive alternatives’; journalists and film–makers like Tom Wicker and Fred Wiseman who taught us about the grim realities of institutional life (as in ‘Titicut Follies’); and state investigators, like Arthur Liman, who analyzed why New York’s Attica Prison...