Not at liberty
Jails (and gaols), Central Prison, the Mercer Reformatory, and the Asylum
Bebout, Rick
http://www.rbebout.com/queen/libtrin/2pnotat.htm
Date Written: 2002-03-01
Publisher: Rick Bebout
Year Published: 2002
Resource Type: Article
A history of prisons, reformatories, asylums and mental health facilities in Toronto and their relationship with the populace, detailing and criticizing the implications of attitudes and approaches to mental health by the cities institutions.
Abstract:
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Excerpts:
The people most abused in the world outside -- "hysterical" women, "delinquent" teenagers, the very old or very queer, "foreigners," the physically disabled -- would not find true asylum. The most aggressive staff were sometimes "made an example," most often when abuse was witnessed by visitors.
But, as Geoffrey Reaume says, "daily degradations experienced by patients were part of routine operating procedure at every level of the asylum." The petty tyranny of individual nurses or attendants might be caught out; rarely was the deeper abuse beneath. Degradation was inherent to the system.
...
Some of us, by education or status, are positioned -- class positioned -- to tap the expertise of the expert class while resisting surrender to its mystique. (It helps to have helpers who understand -- and reject -- professional mystique.) But many of us are not. The Asylum's patients met in the experts who ran their lives, Geoffrey Reaume says, "an arrogance that was overwhelming."
Doctors had the power to tell their charges what they might do and what not, when they would eat, when they would sleep, what they would wear. Few later inmates of "total institutions" (prisons, hospitals, and the military also among them) would have Angel Queen's freedom of attire. Personal effects -- personality itself -- do not make for "docile bodies."
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