Home > FREE > Haunting Histories: The Intertwined History of Prisons and Mental Asylums

• Tweet
• Outlook
• ICAL
• PRINT
• Email
• Feedback

• RSS

• Official Website
• Buy Tickets

Haunting Histories: The Intertwined History of Prisons and Mental Asylums

Presented by Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site

July 26, 2011

Comment on Facebook

Anne Parsons, a PhD candidate from the University of Illinois at Chicago, visits Eastern State to speak about the use of abandoned institutions for material gain, especially through marketing efforts that depict those institutions as haunted. Each year at Halloween, thousands of people tour abandoned prisons and asylums as haunted houses, paying money that often funds preservation efforts. Haunted asylums and prisons evoke the image in the visitors’ minds of people held against their will in those places. Historically, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. were committed to asylums involuntarily and prisons often paled in comparison. Between 1950 and 2000, however, the notion of who could be held against their will and why changed dramatically, as the decision to institutionalize people shifted to law-breaking rather than medical diagnosis. By 2000, involuntary confinement in psychiatric hospitals greatly diminished, while harsh sentencing laws fueled the rise of mass incarceration that disproportionately affected the black and Latino communities. Pennsylvania even converted a number of mental asylums into prisons. These haunted houses pose ethical dilemmas to preservationists and activists each October. But they also offer an opportunity for us to talk about the complicated tradition of carceral spaces in American history, and what involuntary confinement means in the Land of the Free.