Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

The story of America’s mass incarceration and prison expansion often goes as follows: mid-century deindustrialization shatters economic opportunity in inner cities, minority communities turn to the illicit economy for work, mainstream white America fears gangbangers and crack babies and tires of the welfare state. The United States government takes a tough-on-crime stance, instituting new drug and mandatory minimum sentencing laws that disproportionately affect Black communities and lead to an influx of young Black men into overcrowded prisons. This is a powerful and thorough narrative, but it begins at its middle, not at its beginning. It does not completely address why it was that the prison—and not another social support or institution—suddenly became the chosen receptacle for America’s surplus people and social ills. It was the asylum, not the prison, that had long been America’s mammoth institution. In