Asylum/Prison Reform

In 1831 a French writer named Alexis de Tocqueville had visited the United States to study its penitentiary system. Tocqueville concluded that while society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offered the spectacle of the most ridged and severe control. Reformers quickly took up to this cause. Prison reformers such as Dorothea Dix persuaded 9 states to set up public hospitals for the mentally ill. Dix and other reformers emphasized the idea of rehabilitation, treatment that might reform the sick or imprisoned person to a useful position in society.