Prisons, Asylums, and the Welfare State: Patterns of SocialControl in Five Common Law Countries

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This is a proposal to study imprisonment, placement in asylums, and welfare policies in five common-law countries--the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand-- over the period 1955-1985. During this period the trend has been in all five countries toward an increased use of prisons and a curtailed use of mental hospitals. The primary objective of the study is to study more fully the relationship between changes in prison and mental hospital populations in the five countries, and to examine how they relate to changes in welfare policies. The study will collect quantitative data on institutional capacities, welfare benefits, and other variables in each of the five countries. The analysis would use pooled cross-sectional timeseries analysis combined with more qualitative historical analyses. This study will contribute greatly to our understanding of how societies identify and sanctions deviants. Its unique contribution will be to link social control practices as exemplified by prisons and mental hospitals with wider social and political processes expressed in the welfare policies of each nation.