Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

In 1952, less than 150 per 100,000 people were incarcerated in state and federal prisons, while over 600 per 100,000 were living in some form of asylum. And at the close of World War II, the ethnoracial makeup of American convicts was proportional to our national demographics: approximately 70 percent of the prison population identified as white and 30 percent as “other.” By the end of the twentieth century it had completely overturned to 70 percent African American and Latino and 30 percent white. Crownsville’s records suggest that, while the story is nowhere near as simple as one institution morphing into the other, it is no coincidence that the end of the twentieth century marks both the decline of the mental hospital and the expansion of the prison system. And so in trying to better understand what happened to America in this period, Crownsville urges us to start the story of mass incarceration a little earlier—at a time when the prison and the asylum coexisted.