Skip to main content
Palgrave Macmillan

Mental Health in Prisons

Critical Perspectives on Treatment and Confinement

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

  • Includes an open access chapter (Chapter 2: ‘We Are Recreating Bedlam’: A History of Mental Illness and Prison Systems in England and Ireland), available via https://bit.ly/2OYJlKx
  • Considers how mental health intersects with poverty, gender, gender identity, racialization, ethnicity, culture, colonialism, sexual orientation, age and violence
  • Outlines the historical and socio-legal context of mental health and imprisonment
  • Discusses the inappropriateness/unsuitability of prison as a place of treatment

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology (PSIPP)

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

eBook USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (15 chapters)

  1. Penal Power and the Psy Disciplines: Contextualising Mental Health and Imprisonment

  2. Dividing Practices: Structural Violence, Mental Health and Imprisonment

  3. Alternative Penal Practices and Communities

  4. Mental Health in Prisons: Key Messages and Strategies from Critical Perspectives

Keywords

About this book

This book examines how the prison environment, architecture and culture can affect mental health as well as determine both the type and delivery of mental health services. It also discusses how non-medical practices, such as peer support and prison education programs, offer the possibility of transformative practice and support. By drawing on international contributions, it furthermore demonstrates how mental health in prisons is affected by wider socio-economic and cultural factors, and how in recent years neo-liberalism has abandoned, criminalised and contained large numbers of the world’s most marginalised and vulnerable populations. Overall, this collection challenges the dominant narrative of individualism by focusing instead on the relationship between structural inequalities, suffering, survival and punishment. 

Chapter 2 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.



Reviews

“In this book, Alice Mills and Kathleen Kendall bring together a remarkable set of contributions. Taken together, they remind the reader of the silent but powerfully individualising nature of neo-liberal societies and the toll they take on those imprisoned with mental health problems. Documenting the further marginalisation of the already marginalised, this edited collection sets an important agenda for change. It remains to be seen whether or not anyone listens to its findings. They should.” (Sandra Walklate, Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology, University of Liverpool, UK)

Editors and Affiliations

  • School of Social Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Alice Mills

  • Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Kathleen Kendall

About the editors

Alice Mills is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where she moved in 2011. Prior to this she worked at the Universities of Cardiff and Southampton and the Open University. Alice has extensive experience of researching mental health in prisons. She completed her doctorate on facilities for prisoners with special needs in 2003 and has since conducted quantitative and qualitative research evaluating mental health in-reach teams and the effect of the prison imprisonment on mental health, and examining adherence to anti-psychotic medication in prisons. As a Samaritan volunteer, she also ran peer Listener schemes in prisons for four years. More recently, she has completed research on the role of non-governmental organisations in criminal justice in the UK and New Zealand and housing for vulnerable populations. She is currently examining the use of Tikanga Māori in indigenous youth courts and community sector housing support for ex-prisoners

Kathleen Kendall is an Associate Professor in Sociology as Applied to Medicine at the University of Southampton, UK. She was a research associate in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Saskatchewan, from April 1989 to April 1992. This was a joint position between the University of Saskatchewan and the Regional Psychiatric Centre (Prairies). During this time she conducted research on mental health issues with prisoners and staff inside the Regional Psychiatric Centre (Prairies) and Pine Grove Correctional Centre, Prince Albert. She then worked as a program evaluator/researcher at the Prison for Women in Kingston Ontario from May 1992 to March 1993. During this time she carried out a program evaluation of therapeutic services at what was then the only federal women’s prison. From April 1993 to  September 1993, Kathy worked as a Special Advisor on Female Offenders at Correctional Service of Canada’s National Headquarters in Ottawa. She then moved to the UK to undertake her PhD. Since arriving in the UK, Kathy has continued to undertake various research projects related to mental health in prisons including critical analyses of the psy-sciences, offending behaviour programmes and gender-responsive penal practices and policies. Her research has resulted in a number of published journal articles and book chapters. She is currently completing historical research on the first ‘criminal lunatic’ asylum in Canada.

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us