ABSTRACT
This book is about the government of prisoners with mental health problems during the last 20 years. There is of course a much longer history to this intersection between punishment and ‘madness’, and in this chapter an overview of this history is presented. It takes as its starting point the period in the late sixteenth century when institutional confinement started to become a central feature of responses to a range of social problems, including madness, criminality and vagrancy (Foucault, 1967). It then traces how the presence of the ‘insane’ within the penal elements of this institutional network has been a continual feature ever since.
