For most of the twentieth century, state mental hospital patients were majority middle-aged and white, and our modern incarcerated populations are now predominantly young and nonwhite. It is precisely the fact that our incarcerated populations look closer to Crownsville’s demographics that led me and other journalists and historians to raise questions about who benefited from deinstitutionalization and who did not. Is it a coincidence that at the very historical moment when the asylum was being dismantled, the prison, which had collaborated and exchanged extensively with hospitals like
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