She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945, and reported the following:
In 1976, Acel Moore and Wendell Rawls Jr., two Philadelphia Inquirer reporters, won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the rampant corruption at the Farview State Hospital near Scranton, Pennsylvania. Page 99 of my book discusses how Moore and Rawls “reported that the institution covered up the violence [there] such as when the staff wrote off a murder as a heart attack.” To Moore, “the fact that the staff was predominantly white while so many people were black made the situation particularly dangerous.” Moore and Rawls’s series of articles led activists to call for the closure of Farview, which the state eventually did.Learn more about From Asylum to Prison at The University of North Carolina Press website.
The campaign to shutter Farview occurred at the very moment that states around the country decreased the size of their mental hospitals, a process called deinstitutionalization. From Asylum to Prison focuses on Pennsylvania as its case study and traces how activism, changes in psychiatry, and new mental health laws coalesced to dramatically shrink mental hospitals in the United States. Not only was deinstitutionalization about mental health, however; it was also about “race, class, and caring about people whom society had discarded.”
From Asylum to Prison charts how at the very moment that mental hospitals like Farview came under fire, the rates of incarceration in the United States began to rise because of harsher sentencing laws, the criminalization of drugs, and the growth of community policing. The expanding criminal legal system absorbed many functions of the diminishing mental hospital system. In this context, Farview closed as a hospital and re-opened as a prison that served people with mental health conditions. Deinstitutionalization had not brought about the system of equitable care that activists and policymakers had envisioned. Instead, mental health became increasingly criminalized and states put their money into police and prisons rather than psychiatric care and social welfare.
Page 99 is particularly important in the book because it reminds us of the power of people to make change. Moore and Rawls pierced the veil of Farview in 1976 and brought to light the ways that institutions dehumanized and mistreated people. Today, as we face a crisis of mass imprisonment, they offer a model of how to shine a light on the ways that people with mental health conditions remain out of sight and out of mind. The book offers us this lesson and a number of others to help address mass incarceration today.
--Marshal Zeringue
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