"It Has Made Me Think": Engaging the Public with the History of Health in the Modern Irish Prison.

Since the establishment of the modern prison system in the early nineteenth century, prisons and prisoners have been construed as sites of moral, social, and biological contagion. Historic and contemporary studies show that most prisoners experience severe health inequalities, higher rates of addiction and mental health issues, and lower life expectancy than the rest of the population. They also come from deprived social strata. Yet, these aspects of Irish penal history have been largely neglected in academia and popular histories. Our article discusses two public history projects-an art installation, The Trial, and a museum exhibition, Living Inside-that engaged different publics with the long history of health and welfare in Irish prisons. Developed by the research team on the Wellcome Trust Investigator Award "Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000," based at University College Dublin, the projects adopted different methodologies to engage their audiences and explore the experience and management of health and welfare in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish prisons. We further examine the different methodological approaches of each project, their varied aims and audiences, and the impacts reported by audiences and participants. The article also considers some of the challenges of doing this kind of public history, both in terms of working with marginalized communities and presenting research about difficult subjects to various audiences.

'Embarrassing the State': The 'Ordinary' Prisoner Rights Movement in Ireland, 1972-6.

This article explores the early years of the campaign for 'ordinary', not politically-aligned, prisoners' rights in Ireland. It argues that this campaign has often been overshadowed by the activities of 'political prisoners', who only constituted a small minority of prisoners in the period. The article follows the development and changing tactics of the ordinary prisoners' movement, through the rise and fall of the Prisoners' Union (PU) (1972-3) and into the early years of the Prisoners' Rights Organisation (PRO) (1973-6), which would become the longest-lasting and most vocal penal reform organisation in Ireland, until the formation of the Irish Penal Reform Trust in 1994. It argues that the movement constantly adapted its tactics to address emerging issues and opportunities. Ultimately, it contends that by 1976 the PRO was an increasingly legitimate voice in Ireland's public discourse on prisons. It shows that, although the campaign did not achieve any major penal reforms in this period, it had a significant impact on public debates about prisons, prisoners' mental health, the failures of the penal system, and prisoners' entitlement to human rights.

The birth and death of Villa 21.

From 1962 to 1966 David Cooper ran an experimental hospital ward in Villa 21 of Shenley Hospital, Hertfordshire, England. In the histories of mid-twentieth-century psychiatry and anti-psychiatry, this ward has been almost entirely forgotten, overshadowed by the figure of R.D. Laing and his Kingsley Hall experiment. This study attempts to construct a history of Villa 21 and to reassert its historical importance as a manifestation of British anti-psychiatry and the radically anti-institutional politics of its time. Beginning before the opening of the ward, this article follows the story of Villa 21 on theoretical, practical and personal levels through its experimental journey and into its dramatic aftermath when Cooper's experiment was ideologically obliterated by his successor Michael Conran and physically obliterated by the Hospital administration. It contends that Villa 21 is an example of anti-psychiatry's attempt to engage with the very structure of society at a profound level.