Prisons and ‘Deviance

Criminality as a disease

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported in 2015 that almost half of prison entrants (49%) were told by a health professional that they had a mental health disorder. Around a quarter of prisoners reported that they were currently taking medication for a mental illness. Equally significant is the high rate of substance abuse reported by prisoners.

This is a historical issue that has long complicated the place of medicine in modern Australian prisons. Prisons and ‘asylums’ – places created for the management of people with mental illness or psychiatric disorders – were born of the same reforming ideals.

Conceptualised as ‘deviance’, criminality was seen as simply another form of mental disorder – and so, as was believed with mental illness, ultimately “curable”.

Plan of Parramatta Lunatic Asylum, 1855

Both prisons and asylums were also designed to segregate, to remove from society those deemed to be deviant. The intermingling of these ambitions, to cure (or rehabilitate) and to segregate, still dominate discussion about the role of prisons.

The shared origins also seem to be written in the architecture of the institutions, from which it is clear that both aimed to restrain and isolate.