Los sueños del castillo: Peuma mestizo y sonoridades rebeldes para una infancia recluida

This work analyzes the documentary Los sueños del castillo (2018) by Chilean filmmaker René Ballesteros, which depicts the daily life of a group of children confined in a state institution for having committed crimes. The documentary focuses on the stories about their dreams that the youths tell each other and the filming crew. It is important that this detention center is located in a Mapuche territory, given the relevance this culture gives to dreams (peuma). Taking Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notion of queer childhood as any defiance to normativity, we articulate a crucial relationship between institutional confinement as punishment for transgression, the interest in dream activity, the horror genre as the aesthetic chosen by the director, and the relevance given to sound throughout the film. --- El presente trabajo analiza el documental Los sueños del castillo (2018) del realizador chileno René Ballesteros, que retrata la vida de un grupo de niños en reclusión en una institución estatal por haber cometido delitos. El documental se centra en los relatos de los sueños que los jóvenes reclusos se narran unos a otros y al equipo realizador. Es importante para la película que el centro de detención esté situado en territorio mapuche, dada la relevancia que esa cultura da a los sueños (peuma). A partir de la noción de infancia queer como desafío de la normatividad, propuesta por Kathryn Bond Stockton, articulamos una relación entre la detención institucional como disciplinamiento de esa transgresión y la perspectiva del documental que trastoca esa coerción a partir del interés por la vida onírica, la elección del género del terror como opción estética en el documental y la relevancia dada en la película a la dimensión sonora.

Parramatta Female Factory Precinct as a Site of Conscience: Using Institutional Pasts to Shape Just Legal Futures

Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Association through its Memory Project is activating PFFP as Australia’s first officially recognised Site of Conscience. Through the Memory Project, survivors of Parramatta Girls Home are using art practices and social history to disrupt dominant, official narratives that have silenced their experiences, to put their memories of the Home into action and to prevent future injustices of institutionalisation. For law students and legal practitioners the work of Parragirls through the Memory Project offers possibilities for confronting the complicity of Australian legal systems and legal actors in the harms and injustices of institutional confinement. It provides examples and new methods to direct them towards practices of collective ethical accountability in order to shaping more just future legal frameworks of institutional confinement. In support of this argument the article discusses a recent collaboration between the authors to engage law students in the Precinct through an excursion to the site.

You Can’t Go Outside: Involuntary Hospitalization and Access to the Outdoors in Health Care

<p>This paper will explore the practice of withholding a person’s access to the outdoors while under involuntary hospitalization, or civil commitment, in the province of Ontario, Canada. Following a question from the author’s clinical practice, the paper asks: Are we denying mental health patients a right that is protected for prisoners?<br />An overview of the structure of the Canadian legal system and the role of international human rights law in local legislation is offered to situate lack of outdoor access under civil commitment in a broad legal context. The intention of legal and ethical positions described in human rights and mental health law will be considered in light of how these support or negate current practices in health care. Key issues of civil commitment will be defined. Law and policy governing outdoor access in other institutions such as prisons and detention centers will be outlined as a point of comparison.</p><p><br />The purpose of this paper is to serve as a guide to thinking through the issue of institutional confinement without access to the outdoors when a person’s independent freedom of movement is compromised, legally or otherwise. Should there be future interest in challenging this practice, this paper will be useful as a primer for how to approach legislation and institutional policy.</p><p><br />Key words: Canadian legal system; Mental Health Act (1990); Ontario; Deprivation of liberty; Ultra vires; Human rights; Psychiatric nursing; Hospital design; Outdoor spaces; Fresh air; Patient rights; Civil commitment</p>

Deviant Motherhood

This article discusses two intertwined forms of care that engage with incarcerated women in Argentina. First, it examines the consequences of a policy change that allows incarcerated women who are pregnant and/or caregivers of small children to serve their time at home. Institutional confinement extends beyond the prison and has taken various forms, such as the shelter, the asylum, relocation centers, and prison camps. Inspired by recent prison studies that disrupt the prison as a fixed and hardened site, this article contends that house arrest is far from a benefit. Rather, home confinement constitutes a site of neglect where women must fend for themselves to perform reproductive labor as a way to complete their sentence. This practice reveals new forms of social control and state surveillance in which judges, social workers, and penitentiaries determine which women are appropriate for house arrest while policing the terms of their confinement. Second, this article presents the author’s fieldwork involving a women’s collective that offers art-related workshops to encourage incarcerated women to develop a different understanding of their agency and potential. Institutions such as neighborhood and women’s collectives offer new forms of sociality that redefine imprisonment. As women under house arrest are expected to provide for themselves and their children, it is important to understand how they meet such challenges, considering how gender norms and institutional violence impact women’s lives today.

Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910, by Catharine Coleborne

Book Review

Arrested Development: Pursuing a Higher Education in Carceral Contexts

Engaging in pro-social activities such as postsecondary education during incarceration can help to transform offenders and move them in noncriminal directions. This article explores the process of beginning carceral higher education, drawing from interviews with 34 formerly incarcerated individuals who completed postsecondary classes at various state correctional facilities. It also discusses the participants’ readiness for change and changing perspectives experienced during incarceration. The study documents the value of carceral developments in shaping alternative pathways to crime and the role of contextual factors related to institutional confinement, higher education, and antithetical subcultural norms.

Lives in the Asylum Record, 1864 to 1910: Utilising Large Data Collection for Histories of Psychiatry and Mental Health

This article examines the research implications and uses of data for a large project investigating institutional confinement in Australia and New Zealand. The cases of patients admitted between 1864 and 1910 at four separate institutions, three public and one private, provided more than 4000 patient records to a collaborative team of researchers. The utility and longevity of this data and the ways to continue to understand its significance and contents form the basis of this article’s interrogation of data collection and methodological issues surrounding the history of psychiatry and mental health. It examines the themes of ethics and access, record linkage, categories of data analysis, comparison and record keeping across colonial and imperial institutions, and constraints and opportunities in the data itself. The aim of this article is to continue an ongoing conversation among historians of mental health about the role and value of data collection for mental health and to signal the relevance of international multi-sited collaborative research in this field.

Juvenile homicide offender recidivism

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine and explain the recidivism outcomes of a large cohort of juvenile homicide offenders three years following their release from institutional confinement. Design/methodology/approach Retrospective data were utilized to examine demographic, background, and institutional behavior variables on post-release recidivism of 247 juvenile homicide offenders. Analyses distinguish between capital and non-capital juvenile homicide offenders. Findings Descriptive analyses demonstrated a 50 percent recidivism rate among the sample of juvenile homicide offenders. Bivariate analyses revealed few significant differences between capital and non-capital homicide offending juveniles. Logistic regression analyses revealed that youth who were neglected prior to state institutionalization were significantly more likely to recidivate. Logistic regression also revealed that longer lengths of incarceration were associated with decreased odds of recidivism, while participating in assaultive behaviors against peers while confined aggravated the odds of recidivism. Research limitations/implications Implications related to the role that previous neglect, incarceration time, and institutional behavior can inform policymakers and practitioners on issues related to the treatment of juvenile homicide offenders while confined, and the impact that incarceration time and institutional behavior mean for post-release recidivism risk. Originality/value Little research has assessed the recidivism outcomes of juvenile homicide offenders, especially with a larger sample size. None have examined the differences between capital and non-capital homicide offending juveniles. As juvenile jurisdictions continue to retain more homicide offending juveniles (as opposed to their removal to adult systems), there is value to the research to inform policy and practice with such an enriched and problematic groups of offenders.