Prisoners, Insanity, and the Pentonville Model Prison Experiment, 1842–52
“He Must Die or Go Mad in This Place”: Prisoners, Insanity, and the Pentonville Model Prison Experiment, 1842–52 Catherine Cox, Hilary Marland Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 92, Number 1, Spring 2018, pp. 78-109 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2018.0004 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/691233 [ Access provided at 28 Sep 2021 05:35 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. “He Must Die or Go Mad in This Place”: Prisoners, Insanity, and the Pentonville Model Prison Experiment, 1842–52 CATHERINE COX AND HILARY MARLAND SUMMARY: The relationship between prisons and mental illness has preoccupied prison administrators, physicians, and reformers from the establishment of the modern prison service in the nineteenth century to the current day. Here we take the case of Pentonville Model Prison, established in 1842 with the aim of reforming convicts through religious exhortation, rigorous discipline and train- ing, and the imposition of separate confinement in its most extreme form. Our article demonstrates how following the introduction of separate confinement, the prison chaplains rather than the medical officers took a lead role in managing the minds of convicts. However, instead of reforming and improving prisoners’ minds, Pentonville became associated with high rates of mental disorder, chal- lenging the institution’s regime and reputation. We explore the role of chaplains, doctors, and other prison officers in debating, disputing, and managing cases of mental breakdown and the dismantling of separate confinement in the face of mounting criticism.
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