Incarcerating the insane: debating responsibility for criminal lunatics between prisons, hospitals, and families in British mandate Palestine

Abstract

Although much has been written about counterinsurgency, policing, and incarceration under the British mandate in Palestine, little work has been done on those who entered the ambit of the carceral system as 'criminal lunatics'. Criminal lunaticsthe term used at the time to specifically designate those found 'guilty but insane' by the mandate's criminal courts, and retained throughout this article both for the sake of analytic clarity and to avoid misdiagnosing individuals by the retrospective imposition of contemporary medical termsconfounded the mandatory government by potentially falling under the responsibility of both its criminal-legal and medical wings. While the focus in the wider scholarship on psychiatry has often been on its expansionist appetites, the struggle over responsibility for criminal lunatics in mandate Palestine offers a case study in the reverse; an attempt to abdicate, not aggrandise, as the health department staved off repeated efforts to make them take responsibility for these cases. This article traces these disputes, and the development of a distinct institutional landscape attendant on their outcome. But the fate of criminal lunatics was not merely determined by debates internal to government; families were important interlocutors too, who variously sought the release of their incarcerated mentally ill relatives, ormore worryingly for the mandateexploited the criminal-legal system as a back-door to the overcrowded and underfunded government mental institutions. Far from seeing psychiatry as a tool of social control, the government expressed concern about the potential misuse of psychiatric ideas, processes, and institutions by Palestinian families as a way to escape obligations to mentally ill relatives. Foregrounding these fraught contestations brings into focus the sharp limits of the mandate's ambitions in the sphere of the intimate, and the attempts of some Palestinians to expand those limits for their own ends.

The Conflicting Uses of Prison Visitation in Mandate Palestine

“…The history of prison visitors in the British Empire has received only scant academic attention, and only a few scholars have studied the prisons of Mandate Palestine, most of them incidentally. Existing scholarship mentions the tortures inflicted on detained suspects and their petitions through the Anglican Mission, the sexual maltreatment of women who were arrested and detained by the British security forces (Hughes 2009, 17;2013, 705;2019, 523-56), institutional coping with mentally ill female inmates in Mandate Palestine's prisons (Zalashik and Davidovitch 2011), and internal arguments within the British administration regarding the hospitalization of "criminal lunatics," incidentally mentioning complaints about the carceral conditions of the mentally ill and other prisoners (Wilson 2019). Some accounts of insurgency in Mandate Palestine mention in passing the effect that punishments and imprisonment had on the crystallization of national consciousness and on the political role of prisons, but they dwell less on penal or criminological aspects (Miller 1985;Kolinsky 1993;Lockman 1996;Louis 2006, 391;Golan 2014;Greene et al 2017;Smith 2017).…”

Patients behind the front lines: the exchange of mentally-ill patients in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War

“…Although it was originally built for 14 patients, there were generally between 24 and sometimes as many as 50 men hospitalized in what were described as 'inhuman' conditions. Women found 'guilty but insane' were held in the Bethlehem prison, even though there was a mental hospital nearby (Wilson, 2019b).…”

“…A second government hospital, also in Bethlehem, was opened in 1932 and a third in Jaffa in 1944. In 1929 the government set up a small forensic psychiatry unit inside the Acre prison – designated for male prisoners suffering from mental illness and found ‘guilty but insane’ (Wilson, 2019b). Although it was originally built for 14 patients, there were generally between 24 and sometimes as many as 50 men hospitalized in what were described as ‘inhuman’ conditions.…”

“…A desperate solution sought by some families was the penal system. Frustrated by the fact that the psychiatric hospitals were unable to treat their loved ones in a timely fashion, as described by Wilson (2019b), many families filed minor criminal charges against their mentally-ill relatives in the hope that, after being declared ‘guilty but insane’, they would be accepted in a government facility. Most of those patients were sentenced for damage of property or assault on family members and, as Wilson suggests, at least some of those allegations might have been exaggerated.…”