‘Coercive confinement’: An idea whose time has come?

Introduction

Some years ago, the authors coined the term ‘coercive confinement’ to embrace ‘not only the formal sites of incarceration that are normally associated with the criminal justice system (e.g. prisons, borstals, reformatories), but also psychiatric hospitals, homes for unmarried mothers and various residential institutions for children placed by the courts’ (O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2007: 32). We argued that these institutions were seldom taken into account in criminological analyses and that their exclusion was to the detriment of arriving at a rounded assessment of a society’s level of punitiveness and how it might have changed over time. The nub of the argument was that if the prison was used as a proxy for punitiveness, then Ireland, like many other countries in the Global North, was characterised by a trajectory that was steadily, if not relentlessly, upward over the past half century. However, if coercive confinement was chosen as the metric, what became evident was a steep trend in the opposite direction. Our challenge to other academics was to explore the extent to which these contradictory patterns might be found in other places, at other times, with a view to adding nuance both to the empirical picture (is the culture of control waxing or waning?) and its interpretation (what do these trends mean for scholars of punishment and society?).

The position we adopted was that the preoccupation with levels of incarceration in prisons deflected attention from other changes in the custodial landscape. Our commitment to the value of such a perspective has not wavered since we first articulated it more than a decade ago. There are obvious echoes here of the inter-institutional connections noted in some historical accounts of punishment and society. In his reflection on the development of penal-welfarism in England, Garland (2019: 271) reminded us that it was ‘not just penal institutions but also the loosely-coupled institutions of charity, welfare, and labor market that played a role in the day-to-day governance of working people and the disciplining of the poor’. Earlier, Foucault (1977) claimed that the opening of the Mettray reformatory in France in 1840 marked the ‘completion of the carceral system’ (p. 293) and that it was the most famous of a whole series of institutions which, extending beyond the frontiers of criminal law, constituted what he termed the ‘carceral archipelago’ (p. 297).

However, with the massive increase in prison populations in many countries from the late 1970s onwards, and the gradual demise of institutions of confinement other than the prison, this broader context faded from scholarly scrutiny. There are a few notable exceptions. In a case study of the United States, Harcourt (2006: 1756) showed the value of aggregating committals to prisons and mental hospitals ‘for sociological, criminological, and economic research into the incarceration–crime relationship and punishment theory more generally’. We concur wholeheartedly with this assessment and argue that a further enlargement of the institutional context is empirically and theoretically fecund.

The purpose of this article is to update our original analysis, to restate the case for coercive confinement as a potentially important addition to the criminologist’s intellectual toolkit and to suggest the addition of a new feature to the landscape being explored. We conclude by renewing – indeed, amplifying – the call to extend our framework to new jurisdictional contexts.

A cartography of coercive confinement

Attending first of all to the various sites of coercive confinement, it is important to note that while some of them were ostensibly directed at the welfare and reform of their inhabitants, they were usually experienced as degrading, stigmatising and punitive places from which easy egress was not possible. Constraints of space preclude an exhaustive account of the routes into and out of these diverse institutions, their governance arrangements, immediate impacts and legacy. What is offered instead is a series of snapshots based on a wide variety of sources such as archival records, memoirs, official reports and commissions of inquiry. This is intended to be no more than a pointer towards aspects of Ireland’s history that continue to emerge – slowly – from the shadows (see O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2012, for a review of the pertinent literature as well as a selection of contemporaneous accounts of life in these captive societies and Buckley, 2017: 802–803, for a map illustrating the geographical spread of this carceral network).

The psychiatric hospital was the most populous site of coercive confinement, with nearly 19,000 involuntary patients in 1956, and there is little doubt that their experience – even by the standards of the day – was harsh. An inspection of Clonmel District Mental Hospital, which had a daily average population of over 800 during the 1950s, revealed a high level of routine, and casual, indignity:

Patients are put to bed around 6:30 in the evening…Largely due to antiquated ideas about security, patients undress in day rooms downstairs. They then make their way up a stone staircase to the dormitories on the 1st and 2nd floors. They have no clothing on them, except their day shirts, and in several cases they are naked…Until recently no sanitary towels were provided for female patients. (Ramsey, 1958: 3–4)

Children who were sent to reformatory or industrial schools faced systematic abuse on top of dreadful physical conditions and an inadequate diet. By any yardstick, these were austere and unforgiving places. In their evidence to the confidential committee of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (known as the Ryan Commission after its chairman) (2009: vol. III, para. 7.23), 413 male witnesses recounted a bewilderingly wide variety of implements being used against them, including:

…being hit or beaten with a variety of sticks, including canes, ash plants, blackthorn sticks, hurleys, broom handles, hand brushes, wooden spoons, pointers, batons, chair rungs, yard brushes, hoes, hay forks, pikes and pieces of wood with leather thongs attached.…. bunches of keys, belt buckles, drain rods, rubber pram tyres, golf clubs, tyre rims, electric flexes, fan belts, horse tackle, hammers, metal rulers, butts of rifles, t-squares, gun pellets and hay ropes. Witnesses also reported having objects thrown at them, such as blocks of wood or sliotars [hard leather-covered balls used in game of hurling].

A small number were incarcerated as a result of criminal conduct. Aged 12, Sean Bourke was sentenced to 3 years in St Conleth’s, Daingean (the only reformatory school for boys between 1940 and 1973), for stealing a bunch of bananas. Writing about the experience many years later – in an account that was published posthumously and long after he had helped the British spy George Blake to escape to Moscow from HMP Wormwood Scrubs – he recalled that: ‘Iron discipline was the rule…A boy who did wrong did not commit a breach of discipline; he committed a sin. And sin had to be punished far more severely than purely temporal misdeeds’ (Bourke, 1982: 25, emphasis in original). He described primitive conditions, a severely limited diet and savage beatings meted out to boys who, by virtue of their age and poor physical condition, were practically defenceless.

As for the Magdalen homes, these too were places of strict discipline. A flavour of how they were perceived is apparent from the parliamentary debates on the Criminal Justice Act, 1960, which allowed the courts to utilise them as places of remand for young female offenders. Senator Nora Connolly O’Brien argued that:

If I were asked to advise girl delinquents, no matter what offences they were charged with, whether to go to prison on remand, or to go to St. Mary Magdalen’s Asylum on remand, I would advise them wholeheartedly to choose prison, because I think having a record of having been in prison as a juvenile delinquent would not be so detrimental to the after life of the girl as to have it legally recorded that she was an inmate of St. Mary Magdalen’s Asylum. (Seanad Debates, vol. 52, col. 2006, 13 July 1960)

In a memorandum to the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems (1955: 264), the Department of Health, which had oversight of the various mother and baby homes, noted that although there were ‘no legal powers to restrain an unmarried mother from leaving a home at any time with her child’, nonetheless in the majority of cases, the fact that there was ‘no prospect of the mother being in a position’ to maintain her child resulted in ‘a stay of two years in the institution for the majority of mothers’. In the only published account of what life was like in a mother and baby home in mid-20th-century Ireland, Goulding (2005: 25), a midwife at the Bessborough home in Cork, wrote that: ‘It began to dawn on me that this place was more like a penitentiary than a nursing home. My work with these unfortunate ‘fallen women’ would be an eye opener to a different part of life of which I had been previously unaware’.

Unmarried mothers and their children were also held in grim surroundings in county homes, the former workhouses, alongside a mixture of elderly or sick paupers. A committee composed of senior civil servants from a number of government departments investigated the homes in 1949 and its final report provided an evocative description of what it termed ‘the inmates’:

The ambulant men, dressed in suits of almost uniformly drab grey, are most in evidence. The majority look apathetic and listless. The women are poorly clothed but the sense of drab uniformity is less evident in their attire. They also seem to lack interest in their surroundings. They sit in the day room motionless and often silent waiting for the next meal or for bedtime. The unmarried mothers generally look rather slatternly. (Inter-Departmental Committee Appointed to Examine the Question of the Reconstruction and Replacement of County Homes, 1949: 8)

Furthermore, those incarcerated in non-criminal justice institutions, especially children in industrial schools, unmarried mothers and those in psychiatric hospitals, spent longer in detention than the vast majority of convicted prisoners. For example, in 1956, a total of just 21 custodial sentences of 2 years or more was imposed, with none longer than 5 years (O’Donnell et al., 2005: 280). In contrast, 61 boys and 31 girls aged between 10 and 12 years of age were committed to industrial schools in the academic year 1955/1956 (Department of Education, 1956: 121). As they would not be released until their 16th birthday, they would each have served between 4 years and 6 years in custody before regaining their liberty. The average length of stay for witnesses to the Ryan Commission was 7.5 years for boys and 11 years for girls (Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, 2009: vol. IV, para. 4.33). For some of those held in Magdalen homes and psychiatric hospitals, the duration of confinement was measured in decades.

These glimpses of conditions and treatment across various sites of coercive confinement are but fragments of a complex history of institutionalisation pieced together from currently available material. More detailed explorations may in the future offer more nuanced critiques of the experience of being a patient, prisoner or penitent and provide more intricate interpretations of the individual institutions and their interrelationships.

Taking a longitudinal perspective

Our quantitative analysis begins in 1926 when the first census of the Irish Free State was carried out. A snapshot is taken of the population coercively confined this year and at 30-year intervals thereafter, ending with the most recent census in 2016. This is a significant updating; the end point of the original analysis was 2002 (O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2007: 30).

There are considerable difficulties associated with assembling the data required for an investigation of this kind. Partly this is because they are collated and published by a range of agencies encompassing criminal justice, education, health and social care. Partly it is because the state did not prioritise the collection or publication of figures on populations that were stigmatised, vulnerable, ‘illegitimate’ (in several senses of the word) and generally ignored. Partly it is because the religious bodies which played a central role in some of these institutions have been reluctant to open their files to the public, as have some government departments.

For example, records relating to Magdalen homes were handed over by the relevant religious congregations to the Inter-Departmental Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalen Laundries (2013) (known as the McAleese Committee after its chairman). They were returned to the congregations when the committee finished its work, although certain anonymised data were retained along with the copies of state records made by the committee. These materials were deposited at the Department of An Taoiseach (prime minister) with a view to facilitating future research. No access has been allowed to date and none seems imminent in light of the announcement by Charlie Flanagan TD, Minister for Justice and Equality, that: ‘There are no plans at this stage to provide access to the McAleese archive’ (Dáil Debates, written answers, 22 November 2018). Nor have the relevant congregations shown any indication of openness to external scrutiny, with the exception of one which opened its files to a single researcher (see Prunty, 2017). Equally, the archive of the Department of Education in relation to its funding and inspection of reformatory and industrial schools was made available to the Ryan Commission, but not to researchers, and the religious congregations that managed these institutions have been unwilling to make their files available.

The data deficit is particularly pronounced from the 1960s onwards. For example, between 1963 and 1976, no report from the Inspector of Mental Hospitals was published, despite a statutory obligation to do so under s. 247 of the Mental Treatment Act, 1945. In 1980, a report covering the years 1977–1979 was made available with nothing further appearing until 1988 (see Ryan, 1999: 2–5). Prior to 1995, the annual reports on prisons and places of detention published by the Department of Justice were reasonably detailed, but often published so far in arrears that their value was severely curtailed; for example, the 1994 report appeared in 1998. No detailed prison statistics ever appeared for the years 1995–2000 and the quality of the data included in the reports deteriorated over time (O’Donnell, 2008). The annual reports of the Inspector of Reformatory and Industrial Schools in the second half of the 19th century were very detailed, running to approximately 100 pages of text and tables on average and containing vastly more information than the annual reports produced in the second half of the 20th century by the Department of Education (which subsumed the inspector’s office in the early 1920s). By 1960, the latter contained a mere two pages of text and five tables on the operation of reformatory and industrial schools.

A further difficulty is changes in the organisation of services, particularly residential care for children from the early 1970s, when the industrial and reformatory schools were gradually phased out and replaced by a small number of special residential schools. Responsibility was transferred from the Department of Education to the Department of Health (for children requiring care) and to the Irish Youth Justice Service (for young offenders) (see O’Sullivan, 2009). In 2017, St. Patrick’s Institution, the direct descendent of the Borstal Institution, closed and all residential facilities for offenders under the age of 18 were consolidated on a single campus in Oberstown, Co. Dublin.

Despite these difficulties, it behoves those with an interest in the area to attempt to draw together widely scattered and disparate sources to counter the adverse implications for theory formation and testing that accompany what has been described as the ‘balkanisation’ of macro social control research. As Liska (1997: 57) put it: ‘Researchers studying prison admissions are criminologists interested in prisons; researchers studying mental hospital admissions tend to be psychiatrists and psychologists interested in mental health…Hence, issues that cut across diverse forms of control are blurred, if not obscured’.

Sometimes the best that can be offered is a cautious estimate based on incomplete materials. When it was not possible to obtain the required data for the census year in question, the closest adjacent year for which reliable information was available was substituted. What is revealed when this patchwork of sources is stitched together is shown in Figure 1, which combines prisons and Borstal, reformatory and industrial schools, psychiatric hospitals, Magdalen homes, mother and baby homes and county homes. (See Appendix 1 for the key sources of data that underpin the analysis and details of the populations included.)

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Figure 1.

Coercive confinement.

Quite clearly then, Ireland was a tightly controlling place during the middle decades of the 20th century with more than 1% of the resident population detained against their will (a rate of over 1000 per 100,000). This is a minimum estimate of the institutionalised population as it excludes, for example, voluntary patients in psychiatric hospitals and children in industrial schools who had not been committed by a court but were referred by a health authority or placed there by a struggling family. It also excludes those experiencing a physical disability which, at the time, rendered community living an insuperable challenge. Specialist residential institutions catering for blind and deaf children and orphans, for example, fall outside of our scheme (see Crean, 1997; Ó Cuilleanain, 1968). We have also omitted the significant number of ‘chronic sick’ and aged who were maintained in the county homes, limiting ourselves to unmarried mothers and their children together with those suffering from a mental disorder. (How institutionalisation was experienced by those excluded from our analysis is a matter that would repay closer examination, but it must be acknowledged that the data deficits are considerable.)

The fact that more than 1% of Ireland’s population was coercively confined during the 1950s is all the more remarkable when one considers that this was a time of huge outward movement of people. Net migration in 1956 was −48,000, by which time the national population had contracted to 2.9 m, consolidating a downward trend that began after the devastating famine of the 1840s. Emigration meant that the problems of crime and punishment were exported to a certain degree and, during the 1960s, more than twice as many Irish-born men (but fewer women) were committed to prison in England and Wales than in Ireland (O’Donnell et al., 2005: 166; L. Ryan, 1990: 65). Absent the safety valve of the emigrant boat, in other words, the level of coercive confinement would doubtless have soared further. Emigration was a supplementary social control measure.

As Figure 1 shows, the level of coercive confinement was stable during the early decades of independence. The explanation for this pattern is to be found in the new state’s commitment to a form of rural life in which the family farm was the lynchpin of agricultural production and social organisation, and where the urban poor were seen as undeserving and degraded, reminders of the legacy of the British Empire rather than exponents of the values of the new republic (Lucey, 2015: 32).

The various sites of coercive confinement simultaneously managed the urban poor and those who were surplus to the requirements of the agrarian economy. For example, the psychiatric hospital provided not only a source of employment to the rural dweller for whom the land was insufficient to yield a living but also functioned as a repository for supernumerary bachelors and spinsters. The institutions that held mothers who gave birth out of wedlock and arranged the adoption of their children, sometimes by couples on the other side of the Atlantic, meant that the system of impartible inheritance could be maintained. Many impoverished city children were confined in reformatory and industrial schools, often in remote rural locations where they learned to work the land. The Roman Catholic Church offered employment opportunities to younger siblings who were unlikely to inherit and unable, or unwilling, to emigrate. This ensured a plentiful supply of staff for many of the institutions that were integral to the apparatus of social control.

The decline in rural Ireland and concomitant industrialisation and urbanisation drove the decline in coercive confinement. Economic development created employment opportunities off the land. The religious life became less attractive and vocations declined. Modern treatments were introduced for the mentally ill. The stigma associated with ‘illegitimacy’ faded and the state introduced allowances that enabled unmarried mothers to survive financially (an explanatory framework for the downward trend in coercive confinement is set out in O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2012: 258–279). When these changes gathered pace in the 1970s, the system went into terminal decline.

The story of coercive confinement in Ireland is one of decarceration, especially for women and children. Although the last Magdalen home only shut its doors in 1996, by this stage it had already been in decline for some years. In practice, the industrial and reformatory school system was gradually closed from the 1970s onwards, and the schools were renamed residential homes or special schools. But it took the law time to catch up and it was only with the passing of the Children Act, 2001, replacing the Children Act, 1908, that the terms ‘industrial’ and ‘reformatory’ were finally abolished. Mother and baby homes continued to operate with ever dwindling numbers – and much shorter periods of confinement – into the 1990s. County homes gradually lost their catch-all character and increasingly became nursing homes for the impecunious elderly following the publication of the report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on the Care of the Aged (1968). Legislative changes, more tolerant public attitudes, a shift from inpatient to outpatient care and improved psychopharmacological treatments contributed to a major reduction in the numbers coercively confined in psychiatric hospitals. Bucking the trend is the prison which not only remained but moved centre stage. The proportion of the confined population accounted for by prisons, reformatories and borstal increased dramatically, from 1 in 50 to 1 in 2 (see Figure 2). The long-term trend in imprisonment is displayed in Figure 3.

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Figure 2.

Criminal justice institutions as percentage of all coercive confinement.

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Figure 3.

Imprisonment rate (per 100,000 population).

These changes in the landscape of coercive confinement mean that many buildings have become redundant and the change in their usage tells a story about shifting national priorities. Some institutions of coercive confinement have been repurposed to cope with the burgeoning demand for higher education. In 1926, there were just over 3000 students attending university in Ireland, compared to nearly 190,000 at third level in 2016 (Central Statistics Office, 2019: table 7.2). St Brendan’s hospital, Grangegorman – which occupied a large site that previously housed the Richmond Penitentiary and, along with its auxiliary unit, contained 3500 patients in the 1950s (Reynolds, 1992) – is now Ireland’s newest university, the Technological University of Dublin (see Figure 4). Similarly, part of the Waterford Institute of Technology today occupies the city’s former Magdalen home and the industrial school at Letterfrack has become a campus of Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology with a focus on furniture design.

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Figure 4.

Grangegorman: once a mental hospital, now a university.

Other sites have been pressed into service to help address an entrenched crisis of homelessness. Figure 5 shows the former convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity at High Park in the Dublin suburb of Drumcondra. This complex of buildings at various times contained a reformatory school, an industrial school and a Magdalen home (Prunty, 2017). Now part of it operates as a ‘family hub’, providing temporary congregate accommodation for the growing number of homeless families entering emergency accommodation in Dublin, which jumped from around 5 per month in early 2013 to almost 100 per month by 2019 (O’Sullivan, 2020). At the other end of the spectrum, St Columba’s asylum in Sligo has become a luxury hotel, and private apartments are to be provided on the site of the Magdalen home operated by the Good Shepherd Sisters in Cork and at St Senan’s psychiatric hospital in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford.

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Figure 5.

High Park: once kept families apart, now keeps them together.

The first reformatory school for boys in Ireland, which opened at Glencree, Co. Wicklow in 1859, drew on aspects of the model at Mettray observed during a study visit to France by the first Manager, Fr. Francis J. Lynch (Foley, 1923) and, as mentioned above, later accorded such significance by Foucault in his theorizing of the carceral. It was repurposed as a Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in 1974 and in this guise, it played a role in political developments on the island, helping to foster the dialogue that led to the peace process in Northern Ireland by bringing together groups from each side of the political divide.

As noted previously, most county homes evolved into nursing homes for the aged, and in many cases, the structures remain intact with the original workhouse buildings still visible, as for example, in the case of the former county home in Loughrea, Co. Galway, now known as St. Brendan’s Community Nursing Unit. Some institutions have fallen into disuse and crumble where they stand. St Brigid’s asylum in Ballinasloe, Co. Galway is a striking case in point. When the Irish Free State came into existence in 1922, it held almost 1500 inmates. By 2013, it was empty and becoming increasingly dilapidated. Another psychiatric hospital – Castlerea, Co. Roscommon – was chosen as the location for a new prison.

The only institutions that remained in operation in 2016 largely as they had in 1926 were the prisons and the Central Mental Hospital. Figure 6 shows the entrance to Mountjoy Prison in Dublin. Modelled on HMP Pentonville it opened in 1850 and has been continually in use ever since. There is no sign of the prison following the same trajectory as the other places of coercive confinement; contrastingly, it has consolidated and expanded. After 170 years operating from the Dublin suburb of Dundrum, the national forensic mental health service is scheduled to relocate in 2020 to the site of the former St Ita’s Psychiatric Hospital in Portrane, North Dublin.

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Figure 6.

Mountjoy: once a prison, always a prison.

Widening the focus

It could be argued that what is described in Ireland as the system of ‘direct provision’ constitutes a new type of coercive confinement. This is the congregate living made available to asylum seekers who require accommodation while their applications for international protection are processed (for an overview of the introduction and implementation of this system, see Ní Chiosáin, 2016). This did not feature in our original analysis because it was not embedded at the time. Developments in this regard might profitably be viewed against a background of ‘crimmigration’ (a term devised by Stumpf, 2006: 376, with reference to the United States but which has been found useful in a variety of jurisdictions, e.g., Aas and Bosworth, 2013, and Billings, 2019).

We believe that it makes sense to consider direct provision centres as a form of coercive confinement, albeit a weak one as administered in Ireland, for several reasons. They are infantilising in that occupants’ meals are typically prepared for them and served up at set times, without account being taken of cultural or dietary preferences. Bedrooms are shared with strangers. The occupants of centres are technically free to leave, but this is meaningless given the (often remote) locations and their lack of funds to secure alternative accommodation; in reality, they are tightly constrained spatially. An adult in direct provision receives €38.80 per week ($42.49/£34.73 at exchange rates on 19 May 2020), an improvement on the €21.60 per week ($23.66/£19.33) that pertained until March 2019, but hardly generous in a country where the cost of living is as high as it is in Ireland. Much of the allowance is spent on phone credit and internet access, keeping in touch with family and friends in countries of origin.

A brief stint in a direct provision centre, as envisaged when the system was hurriedly introduced in 2000, might be acceptable, an unpleasant but necessary interruption in the life of a person who is fleeing persecution. But some spend years in these centres and raise families there. (The Constitution was amended in 2004 to remove an automatic entitlement to Irish citizenship to those born in the country.) The duration of stay adds to the stress of the experience.

Direct provision centres tend to be located away from major urban centres (largely on account of the unavailability of affordable accommodation in the cities). Like the occupants of other sites of coercive confinement in the past, asylum seekers are beyond the public gaze. When plans are announced about the location of new centres, this can excite a wave of protest and hostility and several premises that were earmarked as potential residential facilities for asylum seekers have been subjected to arson attacks (Hilliard, 2019).

It is difficult to imagine that spending years with strangers in a rural location, unwelcomed in some cases by the locals, prohibited, until very recently (see below) from seeking employment, with a paltry weekly allowance, a poor diet and a lack of amenities, feels anything but coercive. A private member’s bill was published by Thomas Pringle TD in 2014 to abolish the system of direct provision. Introducing it in the Dáil (lower house of parliament), Deputy Pringle stated that ‘these centres are not fit for purpose and they effectively operate as open prisons’. He described the residents as ‘imprisoned living a life of degradation’ and raised serious concerns about inadequate child protection (Dáil Debates, vol. 852, 30 September 2014).

A working group established in 2014 to review the system of direct provision found that asylum seekers felt their experience was akin to imprisonment in terms of the constraints on their liberty but even worse in that it was of indefinite duration. A range of views was expressed about how the centres were operated, with some, ‘run at best like military camps and at worst like prisons, while others treat residents fairly well’ (Working Group to Report to Government on Improvements to the Protection Process, Including Direct Provision and Supports to Asylum Seekers (known as the McMahon Report after its chairman), 2015: 274). Most of the centres are privately owned and operated.

Figure 7 shows the entrance to the direct provision centre at Mosney, Co. Meath, shortly after it opened. Formerly a Butlin’s holiday resort, its chalets now accommodate those who came to Ireland in pursuit of a safer life. Increasing national prosperity and cheap flights mean that Irish people today opt to leave the country for their holidays. The same factors attract refugees and asylum seekers. This is a (partial) reversal of the tired trope about prisons as holiday camps (for a range of views of these centres, see http://www.asylumarchive.com/; accessed 19 May 2020). Migration patterns had turned around by the end of the 20th century, and in 2016, the population had grown to 4.7 m with net migration of +16,200.

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Figure 7.

Mosney: once a holiday camp, now a direct provision centre.

Life in direct provision has improved somewhat as a result of legal challenges. The High Court found that the treatment of residents was not inhuman and degrading, but that the existence of unannounced room inspections, security cameras, requirements to sign in and out and a ban on guests were disproportionate (C.A. and T.A. v Minister for Justice and Equality and others, [2014] IEHC 532). The Supreme Court found that the absolute prohibition on asylum seekers looking for employment was unconstitutional (N.H.V v Minister for Justice and Equality and others, [2017] IESC 35). Self-catering is becoming more widely available and efforts have been made to truncate the asylum application process.

When direct provision is added, the numbers confined are boosted but remain considerably lower than in the past; the trend is still unequivocally downward (see Figure 8).

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Figure 8.

The newly confined: taking account of direct provision.

Hibernian exceptionalism?

None of the institutions discussed above was uniquely Irish. Indeed – with the exception of mother and baby homes and direct provision centres – all predated independence. Magdalen homes existed across Europe and North America (e.g. Barton, 2005, on England and Wales; Mahood, 1990, on Scotland; Ruggles, 1983, on the United States). Thor (2019) has recently argued that: ‘The Magdalene Asylums in nineteenth-century Scotland have been a neglected topic in British history. While more has been published on the Magdalene Asylums in Ireland, especially in the twentieth century, the Scottish homes have received little attention’.

Six of the 10 Magdalen homes in Ireland had their origins in France with the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge who were invited to Ireland based on their expertise in operating such institutions (the other Magdalen homes were run by indigenous female religious congregations). Both congregations also operated reformatory schools and industrial schools, which have deep roots in England and Scotland as well as being found in other European countries and the United States (e.g. Brenzel, 1983; Dekker, 1990; Hoy, 1997). Psychiatric hospitalisation has generated a large comparative literature (e.g. Porter and Wright, 2003). The Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary were French in origin, but it was the English branch that was invited to Cork in the early 1920s to establish the first home for unmarried mothers in Ireland (Lucey, 2015: 24).

Mother and baby homes – which some might consider to be quintessentially Irish – operated, for example, across the United States (Kunzel, 1993) and the United Kingdom (Spensky, 1992) and were seen to be forbidding places for women who had failed to live up to society’s strict moral code. According to Ferguson and Fitzgerald (1954: 132): ‘There was a feeling that conditions in some of the moral welfare homes were unsatisfactory and the atmosphere excessively penal’. They elaborated as follows:

The Salvation Army maintained strict rules in all its homes: letters were read and on occasion withheld; girls were not allowed to go out alone; writing materials, stamps and money were taken away, and boredom was common. The Catholic Moral Welfare Council did not control its affiliated homes, and the rule there tended to be as strict as in the Salvation Army Homes. (Ferguson and Fitzgerald, 1954: 132)

As this article was being completed, the work of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation was at an advanced stage and five interim reports had been published (www.mbhcoi.ie; accessed 19 May 2020). This is the latest in a series of historical inquiries into the various sites of coercive confinement in Ireland, including the aforementioned Ryan Commission and McAleese Committee, and is part of a growing international trend as countries begin to grapple with a legacy of institutional abuse, especially insofar as it involves children (see, e.g. Daly, 2014; Sköld and Swain, 2015; Wright et al., 2017).

Nor were the Irish institutions operated by peculiarly sadistic staff. In an analysis of inquiries into the operation of children’s homes in Norway, Ericsson (2012: 84) noted that:

…a plethora of objects were used to beat children with: belts, canes, clothes hangers, birches, bunches of keys, ski bindings (ski bindings in the 1950s and 1960s were equipped with a steel wire), books, carpet beaters, wet towels, hairbrushes, dogs’ chains, ball bats, riding lashes, brooms, forks, hoes (some of the institutions were also farms). The use of an object may indicate a planned chastisement. However, one also gets the impression that furious members of staff simply grabbed what was at hand and lashed out.

However, the pattern of institutional usage may have been distinctive in Ireland. By the mid-1920s, there were more children held within the industrial school system in the 26 counties of the Irish Free State than in Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales combined. Similarly, the mentally ill were confined in unusually large numbers. The Commission of Inquiry on Mental Illness (1966: 24, emphasis added) commented that: ‘Statistics in respect of different countries may not be directly comparable, but, even if allowance is made for this, the number of in-patients in Ireland seems to be extremely high – it appears to be the highest in the world’. This had long been the case (Penrose, 1939). (The disproportionality may, in part, be explained by a reliance elsewhere on eugenics and sterilisation (e.g. Broberg and Roll-Hansen, 2005) – or different forms of institutionalisation – as techniques of social control.)

Conclusion

The story of coercive confinement in Ireland is one of a massive reduction in the number of inmates, a contraction in the range of sites of confinement and the increasingly dominant role of the state (religious-run institutions are a thing of the past). Over the long term, it is a story of decarceration, except for the prison which has recently been resurgent (although even this trajectory has been subject to some sustained reversals; O’Donnell, 2017). We reiterate our original conclusion that: ‘The most plausible explanation for the decline in the population coercively confined in Ireland is the drying up of the supply of potential entrants rather their dispersal to other sites of regulation’ (O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, 2007: 43). This remains true even when direct provision centres are factored into the analysis.

As noted above, reformatory and industrial schools, or their functional equivalents, were common across Europe, Australia and the United States. So too were Magdalen homes, mother and baby homes and hospitals where the mentally ill were involuntarily detained. Given the international reach of these institutional forms, the rubric offered by ‘coercive confinement’ might prove useful to researchers outside Ireland. At the very least, it highlights the shortcomings of any analysis of penal change that limits itself to short-term trends and equates punitiveness with imprisonment.

It may also be instructive to probe the relationships between rates of crime and rates of coercive confinement. Harcourt (2011), for example, found a strong association in the United States over a time span of almost 70 years between the homicide rate and the aggregate level of confinement in prisons and mental hospitals; the observed pattern could not be explained by a focus on imprisonment alone.

Commenting on the article where we introduced the concept of coercive confinement, Lacey (2008: 44) wrote that: ‘While Ireland seems likely to be a particularly striking case of this phenomenon…there is a real need for empirical investigation of this issue in other countries’. We strongly endorse this call. (The fact that the term has been incorporated into the subtitle of the journal in which this article appears is welcome evidence that what it connotes is beginning to resonate and gain traction internationally).

It hardly needs to be said that to make sense of the present, it is necessary to interrogate the past. There is a great deal to be gained from rethinking contemporary arrangements in light of a broader understanding of coercive confinement. Adopting a wider frame of reference shows that the rising level of imprisonment in the closing decades of the 20th century does not unambiguously suggest a ‘punitive turn’ and must be viewed against a background of deinstitutionalisation – particularly of women and children – that has gone largely unremarked. To understand changing trajectories of social control requires the adoption of a framework of analysis that is historically informed, interdisciplinary and not exclusively focused on the criminal justice system.

While the texture of coercive confinement will no doubt vary according to the context in which it is observed, hopefully the time has now come to apply this idea more widely with a view to probing its parameters.