Reviews

The Discovery Of The Asylum : Social Order And Disorder In The New Republic by David J. Rothman

loppear's review

3.0

My reading this year is circling a thread of incarceration and race, so I lucked out that a friend is teaching a grad course on the history of mass incarceration - this book is the foundational text I chose to join in on. Treats the early 19c invention of several institutions equally, despite the title: reformers bent on curing Crime, Poverty, Insanity by separating these populations from negative influences and instilling order and discipline. Rothman mostly lets the theories and justifications of these often utopian and liberal planners stand on their own, but contrasts them with the colonial precursors (of in-home care and community responsibility to their own) and points out the ways these new institutions failed to live up to their promises but remained useful to the states as populations and migration grew up to the civil war.