Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book provides an overview of the incarceration of tens of thousands of men, women and children during the first fifty years of Irish independence. Psychiatric hospitals, mother and baby homes, Magdalen homes, reformatory and industrial schools, prisons and borstal formed a network of institutions of coercive confinement that was integral to the emerging state. The book, now available in paperback after performing superbly in hardback, provides a wealth of contemporaneous accounts of what life was like within these austere and forbidding places as well as offering a compelling explanation for the longevity of the system and the reasons for its ultimate decline. While many accounts exist of individual institutions and the factors associated with their operation, this is the first attempt to provide a holistic account of the interlocking range of institutions that dominated the physical landscape and, in many ways, underpinned the rural economy. Highlighting the overlapping roles of church, state and family in the maintenance of these forms of social control, this book will appeal to those interested in understanding twentieth-century Ireland: in particular, historians, legal scholars, criminologists, sociologists and other social scientists.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• 1 Setting the Scene
• Part I Patients, Paupers and Unmarried Mothers
• 2 How to Deal with the Unmarried Mother? Sagart, 1922
• 3 The Unmarried Mother: Some Legal Aspects of the Problem
• 4 A Plea for Social Service
• 5 Report Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor, Including the Insane Poor, 1927
• 6 Report Inter-Departmental Committee Appointed to Examine the Question of the Reconstruction and Replacement of County Homes, 1949
• 7 Irish Journey
• 8 Report Commission of Inquiry on Mental Illness, 1966
• 9 No Birthright: A Study of the Irish Unmarried Mother and Her Child
• 10 Bird?s Nest Soup
• 11 Mental Illness: An Inquiry
• Part II Prisoners
• 12 The Prisons
• 13 I Did Penal Servitude D83222, 1945
• 14 Prisons and Prisoners in Ireland: Report on Certain Aspects of Prison Conditions in Portlaoighise Convict Prison The Labour Party, 1946
• 15 The Spyhole
• 16 Dungeons Deep: A Monograph on Prisons, Borstals, Reformatories and Industrial Schools in the Republic of Ireland, and Some Reflections on Crime and Punishment and Matters Relating Thereto
• Part III Troubled and Troublesome Children
• 17 Report Commission of Inquiry into the Reformatory and Industrial School System, 1936
• 18 Memorandum on Children in Institutions, Boarded out and Nurse Children Joint Committee of Women?s Societies and Social Workers, 1943
• 19 Founded on Fear: Letterfrack Industrial School, War and Exile
• 20 Some of our Children: A Report on the Residential Care of the Deprived Child in Ireland Tuairim, 1966
• 21 The Dismal World of Daingean
• 22 Report Committee and Reformatory and Industrial Schools Systems
• 23 The Road to God Knows Where

Author notes provided by Syndetics