ABSTRACT
Reprinted from The Public Interest, no. 26 (Winter 1972), pp. 3-17. Copyright © by National Affairs, Inc., 1972. David J. Rothman is Professor of History at Columbia University. This selection is a summary of his book, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Little, Brown, 1971). He is a member of the Committee for the Study of Incarceration and author of Politics and Power: The United States Senate, 1869-1901 (Harvard University Press, 1966).
