Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and its Alternatives in Progressive America
By David J. Rothman
From the cover: This book makes a unique and significant Contribution to American social history and social policy. It explores, as no other work has done, the origins and consequences of the programs that have dominated criminal justice, juvenile justice, and mental health in the twentieth century. David Rothman combines his skills as a historian with his knowledge of contemporary social problems to interpret the practices of probation, parole, and indetermi- late sentences; the juvenile courts; the outpatient clinics; and the contemporary design of the penitentiary, the reformatory, and the mental hospital. Conscience and Convenience is a worthy suc- jessor to David Rothman’s prizewinning and uglily influential book. The Discovery of the \syhnn. Just as that volume analyzed the origins of institutions for* the deviant and the dependent, so this study casts new light on the modern effort to reform the asylum and devise ilternatives for it. And once again, his appraisal urthers our understanding of the fundamental character of social order and disorder in the Jnited States.
The title points to the dynamic that is at the core of the book. Progressive-Era men and ,vomen of good conscience introduced the measures mentioned above with the intention of iroviding individualized cure and treatment or the deviants and thereby solving the prob- ems of crime and mental illness. But to appreciate the fate of these reforms, one must reckon .vith convenience. Administrators, from war- lens to judges to mental hospital superin- endents, turned these procedures to their pwn advantage. The result was a hybrid program whose flaws we are only beginning to Imderstand.
Boston. Little, Brown and Co. 1980. 459p.