Broken Minds and Beaten Bodies: Cultures of Harm and the Management of Mental Illness in Mid- to Late Nineteenth-century English and Irish Prisons

This article explores the relationship between the prison and mental illness, focusing on the ways in which the system of separate confinement was associated with mental breakdown and how maintaining the integrity of prison discipline mitigated against prisoners obtaining treatment or removal to an asylum. Examples are taken from English and Irish prisons, from the introduction of separate confinement at Pentonville Prison in London in 1842 until the late nineteenth century, exploring the persistence of the system of separation in the face of evidence that it was harming the minds of prisoners. The article also briefly examines the ways in which prison doctors argued that they were dealing with special categories of prisoner, adept at feigning, intrinsically weak-minded and whose mental deterioration was embedded in their criminality, factors that served to reinforce the harmful environment for mentally ill prisoners.