Mental illness/Prison Reform By: Ben Kue, Colton S, Colin S, EmmaE.

Key People Dorothea Dix (Main Leader) She also convinced state legislators to design more safe and cleaner prisons. She wrote letters to inform the government of harsh torturing and living conditions the prisoners endured. After she wrote the letters she convinced the government that mentally ill people were not insane. Dr. John Galt Dr. John Galt worked at the only publicly supported psychiatrics hospital at Williamsburg, Virginia in 1841 called Eastern Lunatic Asylum He also enlighten the approach to the use of drugs through a new type of therapy known as “talk therapy” Thomas KirkBride Born into a Quaker family, KirkBride had began his study in medicine in His training and experience interning at Friend’s Asylum and at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hospital. Louis Dwight Dwight was also the founder of the Boston Prison Disciplinary Society. He spread the Auburn System throughout America’s jails.

Thomas KirkbrideDr. John Galt Dorothea Dix

Accomplishments Over the years Dorothea Dix convinced the state legislature to build new, more sanitary, and more humane prisons Dix helped make prisons more sanitary and she got more people to clean the prisons every day. She had founded 32 mental hospitals, 15 schools and one was for the blind. Dorothea helped influence the separation of women, men, and children in prisons. Thanks to Dorothea Dix prisons were more humane and were not chained together in crowded prison cells.

Goals The prison’s were apllaling to Dorothea, people were confined in cages, closets, cellars, and chained to the walls. Dorothea had wanted this to stop. Dix and other people in the movement believed that the mentally-ill needed treatment, and care; not punishment, and being whipped into obedience. Wanted to create public asylums for the mentally ill. No debtors to be put into prisons. They were already to full. Demanded justice for mentally-ill.

Methods After witnessing these conditions she immediately took the matter to the courts Finally she put together all this data and shaped a carefully worded document to be delivered to the Massachusetts legislature She made careful and extensive notes as she visited with jailers, caretakers and townspeople Once she had succeeded she traveled to other states and proceeded doing the same process: extensive travel to jails and almshouses in a state, careful descriptions of conditions in jails and almshouses, and preparation of a document comparable to the one which proved successful in Massachusetts She sent a document to the United States Congress asking that five million acres be set aside and to be used for the care of the mentally ill

Bibliography History Alive! The United States Through Industrialism Student Edition TCI