Chapter 1 in Democracy in Captivity: Prisoners, Patients, and the Limits of Self-Government (University of California Press, 2023)

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Chapter overview

This chapter introduces the book’s central puzzle: why democratic ideals—voice, participation, self-rule—recur inside institutions defined by custody, paternal authority, and coercive control. Nineteenth-century reformers designed prisons and asylums as “modern” solutions to social disorder, reorganizing time, space, and routine to produce disciplined subjects. Yet a parallel reform tradition treated participation itself as therapy: elections, councils, and deliberative forums were proposed as tools to manage institutional life and remediate “disordered” people. The chapter clarifies a key tension between democracy as treatment (participation engineered to secure custodial authority) and democracy in treatment (participation that gives wards real influence over confinement and care).

The chapter also sets up the book’s broader argument: democracy is bound to a shadowy underside of custodial confinement, and reform efforts often fail because they romanticize civic competence while ignoring how organizational contexts both produce and undermine it. Finally, it previews the book’s case-based approach—tracing how ward politics, backlash, and procedural forms of repression shape what “democracy” can mean under custody.

Core contributions

  • Reframes “democratizing custody” by distinguishing democracy as a governing technique from democracy in the distribution of power inside institutions.
  • Defines “custodial institutions” as a class (prisons, asylums, boarding schools, and related sites) organized around parens patriae authority and the managed limitation of participation.
  • Identifies a recurring reform logic: participation is repeatedly proposed as a remedy for institutional disorder—often to extend, not diminish, custodial control.
  • Highlights a mechanism of repression by procedure: authority is stabilized not only through force but by adjusting who decides, how decisions are made, and the incentives for making claims.
  • Sets up an inductive research strategy that uses archival cases to separate practicable reforms from “hallucinatory fantasies” about democratic institutional design.

Where this chapter fits

The chapter speaks to scholarship on punishment and democratic legitimacy, the governance of “total institutions,” and liberal projects of subject-formation through participation. It connects classic accounts of institutional reform and social control with democratic theory’s concerns about self-rule under conditions of dependency, vulnerability, and constrained standing. It also provides a conceptual foundation for later chapters’ historical case studies of ward self-government and the organizational politics that enable (and undo) it.

Keywords

custodial confinement; custodial institutions; prisons; mental hospitals; parens patriae; democratic participation; self-government; ward politics; civic competence; institutional legitimacy; procedural repression; community control; therapeutic community; democratic reform

How to cite

Chicago (author-date)

Berk, Christopher D. 2023. “Custody and Democracy.” In Democracy in Captivity: Prisoners, Patients, and the Limits of Self-Government. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.