The Asylum Movement

The Asylum Movement (otherwise known as Prison Reform) was the idea for better prisons across America. The campaign was started by a woman named Dorothea Dix, who eventually changed the community's perceptions on the mentally ill. During the early and mid 1800s, many prisons were extremely unhygienic and undeveloped. When Dix took a job teaching inmates in an East Cambridge Prison, she found unbalanced patients were wrongly placed in large prison cells right alongside violent criminals that would often abuse them. Dorothea Dix set out to improve prisons by documenting the conditions of as many public detentions centers possible, then presenting her findings to the legislature of Massachusetts. The council was so shocked by this data that they started setting aside funds dedicated to separate housing for the mentally ill and more regulated prison systems.