Anne Parsons
Dissertation Fellow
Department of History
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About
Anne Parsons is a doctoral candidate in the History Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago, working on a dissertation titled 徹ur Brothers' and Sisters' Keepers: Psychiatric Hospitals, Prisons and the Institutionalization of Twentieth Century America." In addition to studying the genealogy of involuntary confinement in America's prisons and mental institutions, Parsons also works in Public History and the History of Gender and Sexuality. She was a 2010-2011 Balch Institute Fellow (Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Library Company of Philadelphia), and held UIC University Fellowships in 2006-7 and 2009-10, among other awards.
Selected Publications
“Diagnosing Danger: Prisons, Mental Hospitals and Re-institutionalization”
American policymakers and the public in the mid-twentieth century > rejected the involuntary confinement of people with psychiatric disorders. One result was the rapid decline of state mental hospitals. The principle of deinstitutionalization spilled over into penology as small rehabilitative programs proliferated and the number of people in prisons fell in the 1960s and early 1970s. This talk explores the era of deinstitutionalization and how racialized discourses of law and order ended the search for rehabilitative alternatives to the prison and
initiated the process of mass incarceration, particularly in areas with large urban African American communities.